[chipotle_coyote]

Dan might be the guy who falls on his sword if anyone does, but I suspect that he is struggling with design constraints imposed from someone higher up. Someone obsessed with making everything as thin as possible -- which is arguably the root of many of Apple's hardware woes, large and small. Someone with a British accent who is fond of white rooms.

(Having said that, I think some of those issues are somewhat overstated. The keyboard is a real issue; the Mac Pro's thermal corner is a real issue, but it's one we have solid evidence is being addressed by both the forthcoming Mac Pro and the already-existing iMac Pro; AirPower is a debacle, but I don't know if that's really his purview; the rest...eh. I'm not saying they're not real, but I don't know how widespread they are as real issues. But with the exception of AirPower and the Mac Pro, all the issues you listed would probably have literally been solved by making everything 1mm thicker.)

[atomical]

I think Ive is preparing us for laptops without keyboards. Two screens, one that you type on. It's a dumb idea but I think they will go through with it.

[chipotle_coyote]

It's quite possible that's what Ive personally would be happy with, but I don't think Apple's going to do that any time soon. As "courageous" as they like to be with jettisoning old technology, they're aware of what a PR fiasco their current generation of laptops has become. If anything, swapping back to low-profile scissor switches and quietly jettisoning the Touch Bar is the most likely next-gen MBP shift.

[TMWNN]

If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.

[chipotle_coyote]

It's possible. It's not impossible that if they'd just kept the hardware escape key and replaced the function keys with the Touch Bar it would have gotten a warmer reception; I think Apple really underestimated (a) how much of the MBP's loudest and most influential audience is comprised of developers or developer-adjacent techies, and (b) how many of those folks are really attached to their escape key. Personally I would be a lot happier with that -- in practice, I don't really miss the function keys and media keys, and I've actually used some of the Touch Bar functionality once in a while, but not having the escape key makes me angry and I'm not even a dedicated Vim user.

[scarface74]

I think techies overestimate their influence. The Mac’s revenue was the highest it’s ever been last quarter. The lack of an escape key didn’t hurt sells.

[chipotle_coyote]

Techies are a pretty big subset of MacBook Pro buyers, specifically, and that's the only line that has models in it with no escape key. The last quarter was the first one that the new MacBook Air was on sale -- the Air being one of Apple's most popular laptops and the one that had gone years without an update. That drove a lot of the sales that quarter. Were a lot of techies buying the Air? I don't know. But you know what the new Air has? An escape key. :)

[asdff]

At that point I'd duct tape a magic keyboard on the laptop and watch the Ive fanboys rage.