I purchased a 2017 macbook pro 15″ a short time ago to try it out. I had messed around with one before and did not like it because of the keyboard. Strangely, my trusty 2013 macbook pro died the same day I brought the new macbook home. So I had little choice but to learn to love this new machine.

I’ve since learned to live with the new oddball keyboard and its minimalist travel and noisiness that wakes my sleeping fiancee. Who knows, with time I may grow to love this new keyboard in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

I love almost everything else about the 2017 macbook pro, but I hate that touch bar with a passion. The damn thing is so insanely overly sensitive that I am constantly accidently triggering “soft-keys” on it all day long. A bit of R&D with Google turns up a lot of people complaining about this same thing.

In the middle of writing a gripping scene for my next novel, my finger barely grazes the touch bar when hitting a key in the row of normal keys below the touch bar. Bam the screen dims or the escape key knocks me out of my editor or some music starts playing or a pop up window opens or all the apps go into mini-mode. It’s frustrating with a capital F because it happens all day long. The “accidents” seem to happen at the worst possible moments as if my new macbook pro is possessed by an evil genie.

I’ve done my best to minimize these “accidents” by reducing the number of soft-keys in the touch bar and trying with all my might to retrain my touch-typing fingers that have been doing it the same way since the 1980’s… Good luck with that.

Why in the world did Apple fail to make the touch bar pressure sensitive? Why did they fail to provide a way to disable or lock the touch bar until some special key is pressed to activate it? Why did they fail to include accidental graze detection and rejection similar to their fantastic palm rejection on the trackpad?

I can’t see how this touch bar in its current state made it out of Apple R&D and into real products. The ghost of Steve Jobs would not be happy.

Come on Apple… Give us a way to desensitize this haunted touch bar… please….