The butterfly switches break easily and replacing the entire keyboard because of it is a pain. I held on to my 2015 intel MBP for ages waiting for them to address that.
I had one for a few years. The keyboard was bad, and there was no physical escape key. There were lot of accidental clicks with the touchbar, as it had a different logic (touch to use rather than press to use) than the other keys, or the function keys on every other keyboard. And I was using USB-A and HDMI adapters all the time, as the laptop lacked essential ports.
The first M1 MacBook Pros had both the touchbar and a decent keyboard. I love mine so long as the driver running the touchbar doesn't crash, which it does sometimes necessitating a reboot. My main problem is how few programs actually ever made good use (not just some use) of the touchbar.
As for the dongle issue, that went away when I upgraded to a USB-C monitor at home and USB-C equipment at work. I can dock to a monitor or plug into a projector to give a presentation and charge with the same cable. At this point I don't want an HDMI port, and I'm kind of sad that the next laptop will probably have a dedicated charging cable.
I travel quite a bit. HDMI remains useful, as most monitors / TVs / projectors I encounter still don't have USB-C input. USB-A is also somewhat useful, as I charge various devices from my laptop to avoid dealing with too many international power adapters.
The most common ports I need are roughly: 1. USB-C; 2. HDMI; 3. USB-A; 4. second USB-C; 5. third USB-C; 6. second USB-A; 7. DisplayPort; 8. fourth USB-C.
I still have both 13" and 15" Touch Bar MacBook Pros from 2016, and the keyboard is hands down my favorite laptop keyboard to type on since the Lenovo X220. The new ones aren't _bad_ but not as nice. The physical escape key doesn't matter to me, I have had it mapped to caps lock forever.
I also used to use the Touch Bar for a status display for things like tests, it was honestly great. Do not miss the battery life and performance compared to my subsequent Apple Silicon laptops, but definitely miss the keyboard.
I think it’s because of the non optionality of it. If you could have gotten every but sans/includes the touch bar people could have simply made their choices based on preference.
In the end they reverted because they were not willing to make it optional. They also never released a touch bar keyboard for desktop, which would have made it more useful perhaps
My 2019 MBP has a touch bar and a physical escape key, so at least some models did have one. I agree not having it would make the touch bar way worse. As it is I don't mind it.
i also found that weird when I got it but I got used to it quickly. It's not my main work machine but I use it for a couple of hours every evening and stopped thinking about it. I do sometimes accidentally bring up Siri when I mean to hit the backspace key.
