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Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

It takes a long time to get a design through the point of manufacture... especially at that scale. And even before that happens, an organization needs to admit that it has to happen in the first place. For everybody saying the keyboard sucked and needed improvement, there were at least a few people within Apple that had staked something on the design as it was.

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And yet, I don’t think I’ll upgrade solely because of the touchbar. It’s horrible.

I've had a touchbar machine as my primary for a couple years now and essentially don't use the touchbar. But I didn't use f-keys all that much either.

I think there are some software improvement that could maybe make it better, but I'm not sure better enough to be compelling.

How easy is changing the volume with the touch bar. I use the function keys for that all the time.

You slide on the virtual key.

I mentioned you in a peer post that you might not otherwise notice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529637

Thanks, the comment thread for this post is a bit large and I probably would have missed that otherwise.

Not bad... as saagarjha says, you can slide on either that key or the brightness key. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me because I've set the touchbar to default to F-keys for the sake of consistency with the other keyboards I use. For whatever reason, this means that the slide-on-button trick does not work.

Yeah, I'm not sure why that disables app controls :/

The thing is, you can't use the touch bar without looking at it whereas I was constantly blind typing function keys. I think Apple have a different understand of "Pro" than I do.

For me the physical keys are better. With the touch bar, I have to look down to change the volume, and it occasionally hangs with the volume slider visible, but not actually responding to input. That's usually when I really want to turn down the volume quickly, and instead my laptop is blasting for another second while I have to adjust the volume with the mouse.

Also I really would like a physical mute button. It's often very valuable to be able to mute in a hurry.

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