My work laptop has it, and I'm resoundingly neutral. I think it was a mistake not to give it a genuine hardware escape key, especially since there's dead space

My work laptop has it, and I'm resoundingly neutral. I think it was a mistake not to give it a genuine hardware escape key, especially since there's dead space to the left of the actual display where you could actually put something like, I don't know, A HARDWARE ESCAPE KEY. But beyond that, I think the hate directed at it is way blown out of proportion. Maybe other writers/developers need actual physical function keys all the time and will go bananas without them, but I've found that in practice, I just don't. I'm a touch typist on the actual alphanumeric keyboard, but have never been able to hit media keys and function keys without looking down anyway, so I don't feel any substantial rage that I have to look down to use the volume or brightness slider. I kinda like the emoji bar, on the rare occasion I use emoji. It's kind of neat to get a terminal that has both option and meta available instead of either/or, and I admit I use the man page button when I remember it's a thing. And, of course, if I hold down FN, I get all my function keys back anyway -- which is how I've had things set with the hardware function key row for the last few years (other keys by default, FN to access F1-F12), so in practice, there's no significant change for me. (And you can set it so it displays F1-F12 by default and does the touch bar woo woo stuff when you hold down FN.) Having said all that, I'm neutral because it hasn't sold me as being a "must have" feature that's worth the ~$200 premium. I bought a MacBook Pro earlier this year, post-Touch Bar, and bought one of the lower-end 13" ones with the actual function keys.