The catch is that all that modularity makes the thing massive-- the thing's a good 2-3 inches thick (with lid closed) and weighs nearly 8 pounds. It looks like what you'd get if you took a '90s-era laptop chassis, stretched it to modern screen proportions, and stuck modern innards inside. It's just not practical unless it's going to spend all its time sitting on a desk, and that begs the question of why you wouldn't just buy a desktop in the first place.

Yeah, I used function keys all the time back in the DOS days. These days, it's mostly to change sound volume.

To your broader point though, modularity can be tough. It inherently adds bulk and cost. And, now, you have connectors that can/will fail.

By nature, touchbar is a partial display and partial input device, blend it in with keyboard(a purely input) on the same flat surface angle, doesn't feel right. Currently, the only time I look at touchbar is when I need to click on touchbar, 50% of functionality just wasted in this sense.

If Apple kept the hinge design in pre butterfly keyboard macbook pro, that would be good place for touchbar. The location is more close to display, touchbar can act properly as a small assist display, also kept the keyboard part a pure mechanical input. The 45 degree elevation angle is also nicer.

If you still have pre butterfly retina macbook pro, just touch that hinge part, you may like what I said.

I did a quick low res mockup here: https://twitter.com/lostylogic/status/1194875389165760512/ph...

Pretty hard, I'd think. It would probably make the computer thicker and/or clunkier.