Please enlighten me, what's "Pro" about the touch bar?

The vast majority of working professionals have not memorised what the F-keys do in arbitrary situations. (If you don't believe this, you've never worked in as a consultant for a wide variety of companies in a wide variety of professional fields.)

Not only do people not know what the F-keys do, but they have no ability to determine what an F-key might do in any given situation.

Not so with the touch bar. The touch bar will do what the touch bar indicates it will do, which is displayed on the touch bar itself.

As best I am aware, many of the F-keys have no specific use outside development applications. About the only two that get used in widespread applications are F1 and F5. IDEs make good use of them for debugging, but that's about it.

Other 'Professional' software such as video editing or music production usually sticks to key combos rather than F-keys. This is traditionally why the F-key row is used for things like brightness or volume, and why Macs use these as the default function.

I don’t know recently but in my experience it’s absolutely false. In the ERPs or other enterprisy software they HAD to press the F-keys to do anything. If they could do it 20 years ago I simply can’t believe that suddenly humanity has devolved and it’s unable to use function keys today.

i’m sure that humanity has the ability to learn to use he escape keys, just like i’m sure you have the ability to learn to farm your own food. that doesn’t mean you should have to do it to get things done though

computers have gotten easier and learning what F5 does is not in the realm of necessary things that people should have to know to operate their work device

The touchbar still fails even for folks who don’t memorize function keys.

If you are not memorizing the keys, then you will need to look down at the touchbar to figure out where to tap to do what you want to do.

If you need to be looking anyways, why is it better to look at the top of the keyboard, instead of the screen where your eyes are normally located?

Replicating a touchbar style strip on the screen is a much better option than anything on the touchbar.

Think about all of the ways creative professionals augment their computers for touch-based interactions: jog wheels, sliders, drawing tablets. The touch bar is a good way to make some of those interactions more portable.

I am a creative professional - there's lots of stuff that can credibly be done on the touch bar. Just because a tool isn't suited for every possible use case doesn't mean it isn't still a useful tool.

Yes I have thought about it, and I do think "thinking about it" brings me tons of cool ideas about what you can do with it.

But the problem is, there's a huge difference between a cool idea and actual execution, just like Apple's Newton flopped but decades later iPhone succeeded.

I use Ableton pro to make music, I use final cut to make video. I'm pretty sure I fall into the "creative class" of people you're referring to, but I never use any of the touchbar features that ship with the apps unless I'm forced to. It's much faster to use keyboard shortcuts, and I'm sure most "pro" users are already much better with the shortcuts that they don't need the touchbar features.

I'm not saying the idea is bad. It's just a horrible execution.

Since you say you're a creative professional, let me ask you, do you actually use any of these features and think these really improved your life significantly? I'm not talking about imagination, i'm talking about actual product. In my case it's much more of a trouble than any real benefit.

I bounced into a guy that has his independent music label and creates music too, and he loves the thing, finds it freaking genius for the direct interaction and enhanced discoverability in his tools. He's definitely "Pro", but not tech-savvy.

The ability to have functions available to any piece of software that make that software more convenient for professionals who use those functions every day. Scrubbing a video or timeline in Final Cut, for example, is not possible with Fn keys but makes my job infinitely easier for editing.

Developers recommend friends and family on computer hardware purchases. We've seen it before: a company starts out (over)designing for a market segment that includes influencers, gets successful off the back of proselytization, decides to shift focus to the larger, more lucrative consumer market, and takes a big hit as the influencers move elsewhere.

Except, again, as far as I'm aware Apple has never marketed the MacBook Pro by running around Ballmer-style and screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

They just made a good laptop, and developers used it because it was a good laptop. If anything, developers bought and used Apple's laptops in spite of shortcomings (as developer machines) which have been present for at least the twelve years that have elapsed since I first used one.

Meanwhile, I'm writing this comment on a 15" MBP with Touch Bar, and I use it as my primary dev laptop. And... well, it's still a good laptop. I would be less happy and less productive using one of the "equivalent" PC builds (regardless of whether running Windows or Linux) people always recommend. And I know that because I switched to Macs from one of those "equivalents" (a Thinkpad running Linux).

Add in that the people who are complaining about how this is the death of Apple are almost always posting while clearly indicating they've never actually used a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and I don't put this down to Apple somehow "shifting away" from "influencers". I put it down as the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth hate that every Apple product in history has attracted, due to those products committing the unforgivable sin of being Apple products. Company seems to've survived that.

And for what it's worth, the Touch Bar took some getting used to, but now it's fine. Some apps do useful things with it. Some apps don't. About what I expected.