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Comment by twalla | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one who's mostly just excited at the prospect of being able to buy a high spec macbook that doesn't have a goddamn touch bar.

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I’ve never really understood the disdain for the Touch Bar. I’ve been rocking my first MacBook, a 13” Pro, for the last few months and haven’t had any complaints about it so far.

Did you regularly use function keys beforehand?

F-keys hardly, unless you are running programs written for DOS like emulators or badly ported apps written with Windows or Linux in mind that don't adhere to macOS keyboard shortcuts.

But the brightness and media/volume keys (which is the default function of the keys) I use all the time.

XCode's default key commands for debugging use the function keys

Some of us touch-type. Since I have learned to use keyboard properly quarter of century ago I have never needed to look at my keyboard.

I tried to give it a chance. But it is breaking my flow by having to look at the keyboard which is a big productivity no no.

And lack of function keys is a problem. On Linux I am already running out of possible keyboard shortcuts. Touch bar effectively drastically reduces number of shortcuts that I can assign.

I used to change the display brightness with one keypress, now it takes three and I have to look closely. Company paid extra for this.

It is amazing how often this is mentioned. You can tap and hold the brightness control.

If I tap and hold, I get finer grained control of brightness with one or two motions then I ever did with a keyboard.

I'm still not a particularly big fan of the touchbar, because I'm an emacs user.

My wife, on the other hand, won't let us buy another Mac without one, she loves it. She's a pro photographer not a software developer, and that's the market for the touchbar.

With that said, once I disabled Siri, the touchbar has never gotten in my way.

So... I look closely, tap and hold, then move the finger around. What does that solve for? Unintuitive, slower, and not discoverable.

Finer-grained control is not a problem I had that tapping the key once or twice didn't accomplish in half the time and thought.

The older models are particularly bad because they lack a physical Esc and it extends too close to delete. I had to put an empty space where Siri is by default because I'd trigger it all the time by accident. I've also had a couple times where it didn't wake up from sleep so I had to restart to get Esc back. I don't really gain anything from it as my main apps don't really use it and I had to spend $10 on BetterTouchTool to get a weather widget for it which is the only semi useful thing about it for me. Otherwise it's just a shittier function row to me.

You’re definitely not the only one!

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