Apple: Look at this clunky mainframe terminal. Now here's the truly remarkable touch bar. It amazingly replaces keys you use, and it incredibly doesn't let you draw or use mobile apps.
Kudos to the marketing team. They made it work. People bought this laptop for the touch bar, and a few years later, many of the same people bought upgrades to remove the touch bar.
Many argue (and I agree) that they didn’t really try. They released a first version and then basically stopped. It was not iterated on to improve functionality (unless you want to count making it smaller to add an escape key). It was not brought to the desktop, nor to all laptops, so it fragmented their market.
Compare this to their horribly unreliable butterfly keyboard. They iterated on that design many times before scrapping it.
I think their justification for the charging port on the bottom of the mouse has some legs. They state that the cable is not designed to handle much stress around plug and they've assumed that given convenient location, users may be tempted to leave cable connected at all times making it prone to premature failure. So they've opted for short "usage down time" instead of that.
