IMO the touchbar was the least-bad thing about my touchbar 2017 MBP. The butterfly keyboard, flexgate, the USB-C ports that lost their ability to retain cables after like 20 insertions, and the overheating and quickly-degrading battery were much bigger issues.

I didn't really get much value out of the touchbar (never really used any per-app touchbar functionality), but it was mostly fine -- I adjusted to the touchbar escape key pretty quickly.

I wasn't trying to be generous. I was making a nod toward something like malicious compliance. I used to have a big old Mercedes sedan that had the worst cupholder in automotive history that would break as soon as possible. It was designed to pop out of a slot in the center console. But real German car drivers finish their coffee before stepping into the car. That's how I see the touch bar. It was meant to be awful.

The touchbar would've ben great if they also didn't remove the function rows & escape key.

Wait until Apple comes out with a folding phone, they'll say it was the plan all along lol

They never got any significant fine for bendgate, "you're holding it wrong", problematic butterfly keyboards or secretly slowing down iphones due to degraded batteries.

Am I missing some other blunder?

They got lawsuits because they purposely chose a battery that would not be sufficient after a few years of use because they wanted a thin phone, and instead of copping to that and providing support for users to cheaply and easily replace such underspecced batteries, they silently updated their OS to just throttle itself to death to "fix" it.

These batteries were not fit for purpose. The phone design was defective. It literally could not manage after normal and expected degradation.

Imagine if, after Microsoft failed to build the Xbox 360 correctly, they just silently throttled all the machines to reduce the chance they would fail, rather than what they had to do, which was replace all the defective machines, 25% of the fleet, on their own dime.

In most countries that aren't the USA, consumers have a right to expect their products to work for some time and be fit for purpose. Apple blatantly violated that right, and used a quiet software update to hide that.

Apple loves to just deny and ignore their design failures. It used to be the norm for Macbooks to just cook their GPU to death, and apple would always refuse to acknowledge such things until they settled the lawsuit and quietly put up some sort of "we will fix this at your expense" program.