Sadly this seems to be the same old pile-on that happens after every apple product announcement:
> #1. No Escape and function keys [...] The Escape and Function keys on the laptops have been abandoned in favor of a touch bar that changed depending on the application that is being used.
They went out of their way to display the escape key and many other contextual keys with Terminal.app in the foreground† They did this despite it being possibly the least "sexy" demonstration of the hardware. This article seems to have been written after skimming some reporting on the keynote without researching the specifics.
It's programmable. I'm sure iTerm2 will allow you to make the whole damn thing an escape key if you want. Also sure, its not a physical button, but it's still pretty dishonest to go around saying they removed the key and thus it is no longer a "developer computer." This pretty clearly implies that the functionality is lost which is easily proven false.
I'm not even trying to _defend_ Apple here. I don't even really like laptops, though I might have to buy one. I just hate these surface-y pile-ons that happen after every hardware announcement that seem an attempt to mask an aesthetic argument of "i don't like apple's products" as technical one.
> #1. No Escape and function keys [...] The Escape and Function keys on the laptops have been abandoned in favor of a touch bar that changed depending on the application that is being used.
They went out of their way to display the escape key and many other contextual keys with Terminal.app in the foreground† They did this despite it being possibly the least "sexy" demonstration of the hardware. This article seems to have been written after skimming some reporting on the keynote without researching the specifics.
† http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...