Finally had my first hands on experience with the new 15" Macbook Pro with touchbar.  Basically it confirmed everything I feared - its crap.

The first thing you notice is the stupidly large touchpad.  It takes up almost the entire width of the laptop.  So much so your palms actually rest on the touch pad! From my brief try out, the pointer doesn't seam to bob around the screen. I don't know if tap to click was on, but that would have killed it right there.

Next, the keyboard.  The keys are larger and easier to hit, but the travel is horrible.  They feel more like microswitches than keyboard keys.  Perhaps it is something you would get used to, but I am not going to try.

Moving your way up, to the legendary touchbar.  It looks crisp and colourful, but that is where it ends.  The numbers / function keys are all along that row so you are screwed if you want to punch some numbers in.  The Escape key.  Yea, the deal breaker for any developer who has ever used the command line or VIM.  Obviously its crap having to press the touchpad every time you want to escape, but something made it even more annoying.  While I was talking to the owner - after a minute or so - the touchbar fades so you can't even see the escape 'key'!!! WT??

It seams ever so slightly slimmer than the 2014 version.  Looking around the body and you soon miss ports. Just for little USB-c slots - nothing else.  The owner had dongle out the side for his SD card and conventional  USB slots.

To top it off, the owner doesn't even like it.  The only reason he bought it was because he knew a mate who who works at Apple who gave him a huge discount.

I have written previously about how stupid the pricing is - and it is just silly.  But, once again finding alternatives is tough.  Dell's XPS 15 once again seams the best value for money, but even here the price has crept up to almost silly levels.  Trying to find a 4k HP or Lenovo that has 16Gigs of ram or more?  Good luck!  Frankly its just shocking trying to find a good developer laptop.