Steven Levy, Editor of Backchannel:

Fortunately, I do not have to make guesses at what’s going on in Apple’s mind. Perhaps motivated by the grumbling in rainbow-fruit land, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller came to the phone last week to decode the company’s motivations, and stridently counter the cavils of the doubters.

And, from Phil Schiller:

“If we were to do Multi-Touch on the screen of the notebook, that wouldn’t be enough — then the desktop wouldn’t work that way.” And touch on the desktop, he says, would be a disaster. “Can you imagine a 27-inch iMac where you have to reach over the air to try to touch and do things? That becomes absurd.” He also explains that such a move would mean totally redesigning the menu bar for fingers, in a way that would ruin the experience for those using pointer devices like the touch or mouse. “You can’t optimize for both,” he says. “It’s the lowest common denominator thinking.”

And:

“This notebook design has been with us for 25 years and that fills a need for many people,” he says. “Having an interactive place where your hands are down on the keyboard is celebrating what makes a notebook a great notebook.”

And:

Another key variable is whether web services will be able make use of the bar. Schiller says only, “There is opportunity for that.” As for now, the Touch Bar pushes you to use Apple’s own browser, Safari. Writing this review now on the Medium online platform, I get word suggestions when using Safari, but not on Chrome.

And, to sum up, from Steven:

I am still not totally convinced that this innovation — and yes, I will call it that — is really transformative, and not just a cool way to save a few seconds here and there.

Lots more to this, a great read.