A Programmer Evaluates the MacBook Pro (Touch Bar)
I have been using the 2016 MacBook Pro 15&#x27;&#x27; for more than a week. Overall, I like <i>most</i> things about it. It&#x27;s nice and thin, the fingerprint reader is a time-saver. I&#x27;m also fine with USB-C and the new dongle normal. I&#x27;m disappointed about the lack of bump in performance or RAM, but those things are not dealbreakers.<p>The new touch bar&#x2F;keyboard combo, however, is. Here are the issues I&#x27;m having.<p>* <i>No tactile feedback</i>. Having no tactile feedback for the Escape key is... unnerving. Did I hit it correctly? Did it do anything? Even if something actually <i>did</i> happen on the screen, a little feeling of self-doubt follows, and you feel like hitting it again. It feels wrong. I&#x27;m a developer, and I use the Escape key about 10 times per minute as part of my workflow.  Yes, I know that you <i>can</i> map it to Caps-Lock, but chalk it up to 30+ years of muscle memory; I want my Escape key to be where it is, and it&#x27;s hard to switch, especially since you can&#x27;t turn the fake Escape off, either during the learning period. (Maybe I should try covering it with tape.)<p>* <i>Unintended touchbar touches</i>. I discovered to my chagrin that I have a habit of resting my fingers around the area where the function keys are; my default position for the left hand is above QWERTY, and with my fingers outstretched, they reach into the touch bar. This has resulted in some incidents where the machine seems to have come alive and is doing things on its own, when in fact I was just obliviously holding down on the escape key or some other touch bar widget. Muscle-memory again, but then: It&#x27;d be nice to be able to be able to just touch my computer without causing accidents.<p>* <i>It&#x27;s pretty useless</i>. As a touch typer, I never look at the keyboard. Not even to touch farther-away function keys like volume, play&#x2F;pause, previous&#x2F;next. Having a touch bar that changes its contents might be great for novice users who look at the keyboard all the time, but for me, it&#x27;s a distracting context switch. The app-specific touch bar widgets are also generally useless (the little Safari preview of your browser&#x27;s page is particularly ridiculous). I can see where they&#x27;d be nice for providing &quot;analogue&quot; controls for things like music and audio editing, but the rest are pretty close to useless. Consider the emoji one — sure, maybe it&#x27;s nice when you use on of the common ones. But the moment you want a snowman, good luck to you, there&#x27;s no search (unlike the much nicer Ctrl+Cmd+Space dropdown which probably few people know about). In the end, the app controls got so distracting — and the lack of fast one-click access to things like volume and brightness — that I turned off the app controls altogether. Which gives me the same layout, nearly, as my previous MacBook. In conclusion, while the touch bar is clearly <i>technologically</i> very cool, it feels like a marketing gimmick more than a carefully thought-out feature.<p>* <i>Unintended trackpad touches</i>. Again, you have to rest your hands somewhere. The trackpad is now so big that it&#x27;s almost impossible not to inadvertently touch it, especially in a resting position. I have now disabled all the gestures so I don&#x27;t trigger anything unintentionally. It&#x27;s a nice idea that should probably have received more focus-group testing.<p>* <i>The arrow keys</i>. This is probably one that I&#x27;ll get used to, but at this stage it&#x27;s annoyance. While the new keyboard is probably objectively better than the old one — I like it very much, at least — Apple changed the shape of the arrow keys, which means that they don&#x27;t feel any different from other keys. Again, as a touch typer, I&#x27;m used to just &quot;finding&quot; that pyramid of arrow keys under my first three fingers, and muscle memory is now telling me that left&#x2F;right aren&#x27;t positioned correctly, and I keep hitting the Shift instead of Up. Unlike the Esc key, it&#x27;s probably, hopefully a passing problem because they are, after all, physical keys.<p>After migrating to the new machine, my productivity went down a surprising amount, which has never happened with an Apple machine before. If these seem like small gripes, keep in mind that as a developer, all I do is type. I see some comments here that &quot;I got used to it&quot;; but after a week, the touch bar is still as disruptive as when I started. I <i>like</i> learning new ways — but only when they&#x27;re superior to the old way.<p>At this point, I&#x27;m strongly considering returning the machine and going back to my mid-2015 MBP, based on a simple cost&#x2F;benefit analysis: The bad&#x2F;meh simply outweighs the good by a wide margin. I still have a few days to decide. I&#x27;d love to hear if anyone else had the same gripes and overcame them somehow.<p>If Apple comes up with a new machine next year that&#x27;s faster, has longer battery life (I get about 3.5 hours with this working full-time in VSCode, Terminal and Safari, same as my last MBP) and takes at least 32GB RAM, I <i>might</i> weather the bad touch bar, but at this point I fear (and I mean literally that I fear) that a Linux-based laptop might be in my future. It&#x27;s even possible that I could downgrade to the 13&#x27;&#x27;, which still comes with function keys. Maybe the performance isn&#x27;t terrible? But it probably is.