It's not that people are against the Touch Bar. People are for physical function keys.

If they had added the Touch Bar in addition to physical function keys then there would have been less resistance to it.

I am against the Touch Bar and would rather have a keyboard without function keys than a keyboard with a touch-sensitive area that I can easily brush with my hands while typing.

I’m against the touchbar, and haven’t used it at all for 5 years. It seems like it could be useful for casual users, but it offers almost nothing to pro users who already have keyboard shortcuts memorized.

It offers a lot to pro users who want to have more shortcuts than are practical to memorize.

I would rather have those shortcuts visible on the screen, where I am already looking, rather than having to peer down at the keyboard to find them. And I'd also rather use the methods I already have for issuing commands to my computer, the keyboard and pointing device, rather than using a third method for some random subset of commands.

than are practical to memorize? How many could you fit on the touchbar? 20?

Around 60 I think. About six that were perpetually visible, then a dozen that were revealed via a "folder" that appeared when one of those was tapped. The remainder swapped out per-app (like, one set for Safari, another for XCode, etc.).

So you never changed volume or luminosity ?

They could have easily changed volume on their display - I had the touchbar but never liked the fact that you had to look away from your screen just to change the volume.

Changing volume is definitely one of those use cases where the physical function keys were much better IMO - It's one physical button press rather than touch the button, look down at the slider, and try to drag it into the right position.

I also use my laptop in a dock about 50% of the time, so end up just using the on-screen volume adjustment and keyboard shortcuts anyway... If Apple really believed in the concept they would have put the touchbar into their keyboards too.

They definitely could’ve made this more discoverable, but you can touch and immediately drag to change any of the sliders. No need to lift your finger or have a 2 step process

At that point I might prefer a touch screen that can be disabled. The extra real estate for touchbar with the minimal functionality didn’t make sense to me

I also just cannot stop hitting it by accident. It's been a year and I'm still doing it constantly. I don't know what's wrong with me.

You and everybody else :) I think its combination of placement and behavior/sensitivity contributed to its demise.

Less? That's like 1.5 additional browser bars sitting there doing nothing. And we all know how much we hated additional browser bars (Remember the old times when we still had those? lolol).

As of now, it's 0.5 additional bars. The whole row after ESC is pretty much useless.

I can't imagine having so few Safari tabs open that changing tabs with the touchbar would be useful ...

Honestly, I'm on the side of "the touchbar is inoffensive". Never bothered me one bit, but I don't use it anyway so I don't care that they're removing it*. I'm sympathetic, though. I always liked the butterfly keyboard, and the general opinion on that has been made patently obvious.

* I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I never look at the keyboard, so it just doesn't occur to me to use the touchbar, same as I never saw the point of keyboard backlighting.

I also love the touchbar, the only button it's not superior to is the escape button. Who touch types the function keys anyway? Love it for the volume and screen brightness controls.

Not too worried about my laptop being killed though, they screwed the keyboard up so hard it's essentially dead anyway. Have to take it to the Apple Care center to have it revived again sometime soon because I've got 3 sticky keys that won't unstick.

I touch-type volume and brightness keys all the time. Back in the olden days I touch-typed function keys for debugging (F5 = continue, F6 = step over, etc).

Volume and brightness are probably the main reason why I absolutely hate the touchbar. It's clumsy to adjust, they never respond quite as fast, and sometimes take 2 or 3 touches to actually acutate, despite the button on the LCD changing the background - which means physically it actually registered my finger but decided to ignore it.

Second gripe is precisely its main selling point - that it can change based on context. I don't want my keyboard changing. I don't want to have to look down to operate my laptop, it breaks the flow and slows me down. I had 2 laptops with the Touch Bar. I tried every software for customising it. BTT, MTBMR (or whatever it's called), and at least one other. I always eventually fix them with the few buttons I use (no sliders): volume/mute, screen brightness, keyboard backlight.

Then, there's also the fact that you can't adjust its brightness or turn it off, and it's always emitting the full spectrum of light, which I find uncomfortable in the dark or late in the day. Granted, this is a smaller thing which is why it's at the bottom but it builds up the list of annoyances.

Edit: just remembered another one - it can freeze. Most of the time it can be fixed by killing a process. Other times, you need to reboot the computer.

> changing Safari tabs

FYI, command-<number> will let you switch between browser tabs. So command-2 will bring you to the second tab (starting from the left), etc. I tend to only navigate between the first five tabs or so in this manner (basically, what I can reach with my left hand), and I drag tabs I'm likely to navigate to like this to the left.

What this looks like in practice is:

<tab1> some admin console </tab1> <tab2> email </tab2> ... <tab10> documentation about the admin console </tab10> (drag documentation in tab10 to occupy tab2)

Now I can use command-2/1 to go between the console documentation and the console itself. IMO, the cost of dragging a tab to the left is much cheaper than having to break your visual connection with the screen in order to hunt through the touchbar.