[jwilliams]

I've got the 13" maxed out Late 2016. I've owned every form factor of the MacBook Pro and this is my least favorite.

I like the USB-C and have bought into the tradeoff of having no Magsafe. It's also a minor plus to be able to plug in either side of the machine. The TouchID is good too. However, I've found the TouchID extremely laggy for some reason (esp. on unlock) which really reduced the benefit.

The keyboard is _fine_ and in some ways I feel it's a good compromise for the form factor. However it is very, very loud. It's terrible for typing on calls. If your significant other is watching TV next to you they'll get annoyed too.

Battery life is average. I've found it quite variable to the point that I don't "trust" my charge on a long flight any more - which is still fine with my previous gen machine.

Maybe an outlier here - I feel the Touchbar is a UX nightmare. Maybe if you're principally in one app it makes a lot of sense, but I change around a lot. It goes totally against muscle memory. I have to look down to work out what's going on, and even then take it in. I see that they're going for some kind of "discovery" experience, but predictability and patterning is important too - especially with an interface that you're trained _not_ to look at.

I've locked it to the standard buttons that don't change, but even then my finger grazes it and the brightness of my screen changes... For me it's a distraction.

[gnat]

+1 here. I also have a maxed-out 13" Late 2016 Pro. The fake Esc key on the Touchbar makes me sad every time I use it (I don't have your Touch ID lag, though). And, as you say, the keyboard is insanely loud. Who needs to advertise "I AM TYPING" so much? And if loud feedback is so important in a keyboard, wtf ESC wtf?

I've made my peace with USB C for power, but the battery feels like it's good for trips to the coffee shop but not for actually taking a long flight anywhere. As you say, variable battery life is more of a curse than a blessing. It leads to distrust rather than gratitude.

And all this mediocrity for an eye-watering price. It's my first regretted Apple purchase (I managed to avoid the brief wearable fad).

My screensaver says it all: "Don't buy one of these machines."

[bradgessler]

Same. The TouchBar needs a lot of tweaking at a software level. My problem is when I hit "Play" or "Pause" I expect my music to play or pause. The problem is that it's possible for other apps to steal focus for play and pause. For example if you're watching a video clip in Safari and hit Pause to stop your music after you started playing the video, it will pause the video.

The most annoying thing I'm dealing with at the moment is HipChat stealing focus of the play button. When that happens and I hit that play button, HipChat just plays the new message sound. Its so dumb.

The TouchBar is more complicated and awkward at the moment. In my opinion Apple needs to tweak the Keyboard settings to let me deal with these "stupid apps" and we all need to report TouchBar issues to third party apps doing it wrong like HipChat.

[mintplant]

> The most annoying thing I'm dealing with at the moment is HipChat stealing focus of the play button. When that happens and I hit that play button, HipChat just plays the new message sound. Its so dumb.

Is the HipChat app built on something like Electron? It could be they're using a hidden <audio> element to play the new message sound which the browser engine thinks you want to play/pause.

[WillKirkby]

> The most annoying thing I'm dealing with at the moment is HipChat stealing focus of the play button. When that happens and I hit that play button, HipChat just plays the new message sound. Its so dumb.

Yup, had this with WhatsApp web too. My suspicion is there's a hidden <audio> tag for the sound and safari's just exposing controls for that.

[Wildgoose]

I wonder if they would have been better leaving the Escape and Function keys alone and adding the Touch Bar as a (useful) additional interface rather than a (bad) replacement interface?

[drcode]

The main problem I have with the keyboard is that the small travel gives it very small tolerances for to achieve the "clickiness", and after a few months use I can already feel that some keys are less clicky than others, due apparently to uneven wear in the mechanism among different keys... I wonder if there'll be a "keyboard-gate" situation in a year as more people notice this, or if I'm an outlier.

[dan_m2k]

FYI, my new 13in MBP went back after 9 days because of failed/stuck keys :(

[WalterSear]

IMHO, the touchbar had more to with competitive positioning against microsoft's touchscreen than optimising benefit for the user. It's the new 'one button mouse'.

[jp555]

Bret Victor tweeted that the TouchBar took 8 years of work to go from conception to production. https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848

You sure it was a reaction to MS?

[khaledtaha]

Yes, but that can also mean that during that it was shelved as a bad idea only to be revived as a scrambled attempt to have a one-more-thing moment.

[WalterSear]

An 8 year release process lines up with the release of touchscreen-enabled windows 7 and 8. Sure, they may have been investigating it before the windows release, but the choice to produce this hamfisted feature, rather than a touchscreen, still looks like a competitive reaction.

Many things take lots of time to develop, and lots of things never make it into an actual release.

EDIT: khaledtaha's comment above sounds even more plausible, give the strategy Apple currently appears to be pursuing.

[tlow]

Steve Jobs: "I'm as proud of the things I have done as the things I have not". Jobs would not have brought this version of TouchBar to market; not a chance.[1]

[1] My source is my personal opinion and anecdotal. If I'm not unimpeachably correct in this assertion you should downvote; there is no possible means to prove the assertion so only judgement can decide the validity of my claim. While I had met Jobs and had multiple run-ins with him in Palo Alto (I was an avid walker and lived on Ramona for several years), I never knew him well on an intra-personal level.

[sbuk]

It doesn't matter what Jobs would've done. It's a different Apple now. Also "Never ask what I would do. Just do what's right." Tim, Jonny or whoever clearly thought the Touch Bar was "right".

[k-mcgrady]

If you need a massive disclaimer at the end of your comment explaining that something you expressed as a fact shouldn't be treated as a fact what's the point? Jobs made plenty of bad product decisions, some much worse than the touch bar.

[dash2]

You never knew him well on a personal level. An intra-personal level would mean that you were stuck in the same body, like Being John Malkovich.

[tlow]

lol whoops interpersonal then?

[adiabatty]

I suspect I'd use the touch bar in Notes where I frequently want to use title and header and normal formatting, but have trouble remembering the keyboard shortcuts for those three functions (I'm not in Notes much).

In other apps, I don't know how much I'd use it.

[fludlight]

That's the thing: the HN crowd is a small segment of their user base. For most people, Cmd-P might as well be C-x M-c M-butterfly. The touch bar doesn't replace the function keys but rather the mouse.

[eecc]

Hmm, there's a touch of contempt for the average user in what you say... something that causes this current trend towards over-simplification.

Users love clear, systematic, repeatable, stable. Anyone using a shortcut often enough, given enough time will learn to use it because anyone can appreciate the advantage.

People that hunt-and-peck, or click around like seniors in a retirement-home absolutely hate the hostile and cumbersome UI that is hiding all the usefulness behind gimmicks.

;)

[fludlight]

It's not like I said they were "click[ing] around like seniors in a retirement-home". ;)

IMHO, users don't care about simple, clear, systematic, or repeatable, either; only stable. But keeping said workflow stable doesn't matter when your boss' bonus depends on how much innovation he fostered.

[kayoone]

I even had the Touchbar die on me when waking the laptop from a previously drained battery. The whole Touchbar was just black, requiring a full reboot. This only happened 2-3 times in about 6 weeks, but still. I also have occasional problems with externals Monitors (i use two, one through DVI) staying black and requiring plugging out/in to fix. These small annoyances are just unnecessary as it worked perfectly before. I don't really see a benefit in the Touchbar anyway. When I alt-tab out of spotify it will show the spotify icon to control it but as soon as i got to another app it will steal the focus and i have to go back to Spotify manually. UX nightmare.

[SomeHacker44]

Amen to the loud comment. I have been kicked out of the bedroom several times over it already.