>Phyisical keys are great but 12 buttons labelled F1 to F12 with different functions depending on the program also isn't he pinnacle of UX
x1000. Function keys have almost always been useless to me. Once in a while I will remember what one is mapped to and use it, but for the most part they go unused.
They used to make cardboard guides that could sit on top of the older ibm keyboards when most of the world used one... I don’t know that you can replace the feel but some haptic taps or something might improve the touch bar. I generally like it bur on it and my older MBPs I pretty much used escape and volume and screen brightness settings and otherwise never used that row. Since laptops, the f-keys simply aren’t what they used to be, it’s not unusual for them to be overloaded or even require a shift like key to be pressed for f-key behavior.
I can see this in a small number of situations, but how many developers use the laptop's screen and keyboard for coding?
Pretty much everyone I know and every workplace I've seen has proper monitors and keyboards for everyone (developers included). A laptop has terrible ergonomics. That makes the touchbar a bit pointless, except when working on a train or plane, or at a meeting or conference.
I'd assume you'd be right, but anecdotally I am really surprised walking around my office how many people have their MacBook Pros connected to an external monitor -- and have the MBP open, typing on the internal keyboard and using the internal display as a second monitor. I've seen more than one person with two external monitors and still do that, so they have three monitors total. I don't know, to be fair, how many of them are actually using the Touch Bar; most folks use Visual Code, which I don't think does anything with it. (I am a technical writer still using BBEdit for reasons I should eventually write a dorky blog post about, but BBEdit doesn't use the Touch Bar, either.) Personally, I think it's a really neat experiment that turned out to be a solution in search of a problem.
(For what it's worth, I have one external monitor at work and run my MBP closed, with an external keyboard -- up until last week a Matias "Laptop Pro" mechanical, but ironically, the Matias developed a seriously malfunctioning key before the butterfly keyboard did. Currently I'm using a "full-sized" Magic keyboard there.)
I'm probably an outlier, but I use the laptop's screen and keyboard most of the time. My normal environment is in a La-Z-Boy in front of the TV with a lap desk. It's quite nice.
I have a computer room / office as well that's a really nice setup, but I prefer sitting in the recliner.
Intellij, Outlook and Apple's own programs integrate it very well.
Phyisical keys are great but 12 buttons labelled F1 to F12 with different functions depending on the program also isn't he pinnacle of UX.