I've been using MacBook Pro's with the touch bar for a while now, but I just picked up a MacBook Air (in addition to my MacBook Pro). It has a mechanical top row, with just the Touch ID button at the end and it's fantastic. It's so nice to have those keys back! I would pay $100 extra for a MacBook Pro without the touch bar.
Yeah, it's great. When I use my MacBook Pro at my desk, I just use an external keyboard and that covers a lot of usage time where I don't have to deal with the touch bar.
I actually really like the touch bar. I'd enjoy my 2016 MBP if it wasn't for the 2 keys that are now unreliable on the keyboard. That and the fact that it crashes every time the battery runs out.
I like the touch bar too. I just want the Esc key back (although they did add the option to remap CapsLock to Esc, so hurray for that, but honestly it was a delayed feature.)
I have the Caps Lock key mapped to Control (for Unixy things, especially Emacs), and the Control key mapped to Escape -- which, incidentally, improves locality of the Force Quit key combination.
> I actually really like the touch bar.
An app called Pock supposed to make it vaguely useful, but fails to display consistently...
> the fact that it crashes every time the battery runs out.
This. Mine crashed with caffeinate on and would boot into state where display is off. Took me an hour and bunch of stress reset SMC/NVRAM/etc that brought it back to life.
Here's the keyboard in all its glory (if you're curious): https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/M...