Remind me again how function keys can produce full colour multitouch interfaces, such as video/image scrubbers, colour pickers, etc.
The standard "function keys can do anything" response is getting old.
The standard "function keys can do anything" response is getting old.
That "function keys can do anything" is, in my opinion, the exact reason they had to go. They're scary for the typical user. What is F7? You may know, but it's not obvious in any way. That some of them cause destructive actions (e.g. Alt+F4 on Windows) makes it worse - they're scary to many users. And even when after figuring out what some of them do, one is stuck wondering "was that F8? Or F9? Oh! It was F10" (which, includes the worry that a wrong guess could cause problems).
Though, I cannot believe they shipped it without the haptic feedback to make it clear that a button was actually clicked.
^ Also, none of that, to me, includes Esc. Esc seems clear enough in its intent, and I hold no ill-will toward the Esc key.
Haptic feedback would be interesting..
I'm surprised they didn't include it given how much they've been pushing it on iOS, as well as on the touchpad of Macs.
Then make the whole screen touch enabled and bypass the silly, tiny screen gimmick.
Also, that still requires the actual controls to be on-screen somewhere. With the touch bar, you can opt to not have those controls (e.g. a toolbar in an IDE, or a palette in a visual tool like photoshop) shown on the main display if they're available when contextually relevant, on the touch bar.
This bar is all the bad stuff about a touchscreen (limited/no tactile feedback, reduced ability to rely on muscle memory) plus the bad stuff about keyboards (primarily that they are not where your eyes are naturally). There are a few tiny niche uses cases that will be nice, like video scrubbing, but 90% of the time it's just going to be functionality that is more difficult to use than it was previously.
Don't mistake your opinion for a fact.
I'm pretty sure I hate the current situation with F-Keys at least as much as you claim to hate multi-touch interfaces.
If you truly use F-Keys by touch (i.e. without looking) forcing the touch bar into F-Key mode should get you pretty close to what you had anyway.
The F-Keys don't have the little identifying lumps (on mine these are on F & J), so you simply have to know where they are by muscle memory. The only difference is you're tapping like a track-pad tap (as opposed to trackpad click).
It's really a very well laid out keyboard design. The worst thing about laptop keyboards is that they are all so non-standard, and every manufacturer does their own special-snowflake thing, so that it is almost impossible to touch-type on an unfamiliar machine.
The "I need to pick colors and scrub video" response is getting old. Nobody does that stuff often enough for it to be a good trade off.