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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

The big problem I see is that my laptop is hooked up to a display half the time, lid closed. It wouldn’t be useful for showing anything that isn’t also on the main display. And it can’t have a set of bar-only controls (if Apple were serious about that use, they would have released an external keyboard with Touch Bar by now).

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Which is why Apple tends to put non-required controls in the Touch Bar. It's a nice thing to have, but not every Mac has one, so they have to put shortcuts there rather than new features.

If you have an iPad, you can use duet to simulate the touchbar on the bottom of the display. This makes it all the more useful if you're using your iPad to see chat messages or monitor the status of a terminal since it also takes advantage of the touchscreen

Yes, surely; Apple already had superior touch devices supporting Handoff, etc. It would have made way more sense to extend Handoff and let the larger, more capable touch screens of iOS devices interact with Macs.

This, I'm currently in the market for a new macbook and considering the tb model. I tried it in the store, it doesn't bother me as much as it should considering i'm a vim user and it does offer some nice contextual features. But I use my laptop mostly docked. So in order to benefit from the touchbar and incorporate it into my workflow I really need a external keyboard with the same feature. Otherwise I'm just adjusting my workflow all the time in relation to where I sit and I'd then rather just ignore the touchbar and stick with shortcuts.

exactly, if they had a USB keyboard (please, no pointless wireless battery powered nonsense) with TouchBar I might even try it out

it would be bigger so they could keep the 'real' Esc key etc and avoid most of the problems people encountered

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