It always seemed backwards that the touch bar is a pro feature. Aren't pros the group that learn all the keyboard commands? The touch bar seems like it would be most useful to non-pro users.
My assumption has always been that the "Pro" line is aimed at content creators. Because in lots of professional work you would want a plethora of ports which Apple doesn't give you.
When they started removing ports I use I switched to a Thinkpad T-series. It's been the perfect laptop for my use.
Faders are the right abstraction for a lot of pro media stuff. The touch bar is an okay middle ground between keyboard/mouse and a separate hardware control surface.
Can you do audio or video scrubbing with FN keys? Have you used touchbar with Photoshop or similar apps? A Pro User doesn’t mean “software developer” — there are a lot of other pros that really love the touchbar.
Now that I think about this more, if you are right, then why don't the Mac Pros come with a touchbar keyboard? Video and photo editing are probably the primary uses for the Mac Pro.
Because all of those use cases already have purpose built peripherals that would be more appropriate to use with a stationary workstation. Laptops benefit from something more portable and general purpose.
Which is fair — film, music, design, photography have been the core pro markets for Apple for much longer than developers have been — Final Cut, Logic Pro and the defunct Aperture are clear proof of that. The Touch Bar kind of became the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people, but this prioritisation at the hardware level is much older, and much more pervasive than that.
That sort of creative also gets much more benefit from the four Thunderbolt ports than developers do (we mostly use them as inconvenient USB and/or display ports, and AFAICT Thunderbolt is borderline irrelevant. Same as with Firewire back in the day). As much as I enjoy using my iMac 5k for programming, it's when I use it for Lightroom that I really get a real benefit from it. Most of my development work doesn't benefit that much from an SSD (when I wrote C++ professionally, that was a different story...), but by gods it makes a difference when I try to edit 4k video.
I mostly think of it as the emoji bar. It's genuinely useful for people (pros and non-pros) who type a lot of emojis to have them on the keyboard. But it's certainly not specifically a pro feature, I agree 100%.
Apple probably has better data on how it gets used than I do, but that's almost exclusively what I'd use it for if I had it.
Funny, I actually bought them for the transparency mode, precisely so that I can hear the clickity clacking of everyone's mechanical keyboards. It's comforting.
