I thought the touchbar was pretty neat, it was just a mistake to replace the function row with them. It also was hard to get adoption because it wasn’t available on desktop Macs or their cheaper laptops so developers had no incentive to really do anything interesting with them.

I think a better implementation might have been to have it be an alternate mode for the trackpad and sell external trackpads that also had it so it could be used everywhere. But I get why that didn’t happen, the touchbar was basically being run with a mini Apple Watch SOC built into the MacBook Pro, and it’s primary use was to have the Secure Enclave on it. The touchbar itself was a deal where they could find a use for having an otherwise idle smartwatch’s worth of computing power in there, but that wouldn’t be doable if it’s sold as an external device.