I prefer non-touch because:
- Speaker locations on the non-touch. Sound primarily driven from speaker grills, while on touch bar, it is coming through the air vents.
- I think the touch-bar will require another year before it gets all its bugs fixed and actually becomes a useful tool.
- Battery life greatly better, due to larger battery, less power hungry CPU and no touch-bar.
- I think the QC will be better on non-touch due to more issues having been resolved, I am thinking it has been in production a lot longer than the touch-bar versions. So, less likely to encounter build quality issues (this isn't fact, just my own personal view).
- The difference in performance between the 15w and 28w is likely to not be visible in your work flow, simply because for the 15w to throttle, both the CPU and GPU have to be taxed quite a bit and most things you do won't be doing that. Anything that your non-touch bar can't handle, there is a very good likelihood the 28w can't hack it either and that you'll actually need a quad core processor
- The SSD is not soldered on, unlike the touch bar models. Not so important in terms of upgrades, but sometimes if just the SSD fails, you can just replace SSD rather than everything on the laptop. Or similarly, it is removable if something else is damaged and you want to keep the SSD data as is and continue to just plug it in a replacement MacBook.
The only thing really benefiting the touch-bar is that would be useful for me (I don't see the slightly faster CPU/GPU as that useful):
- More value for money if you really need 16gb/512gb variant, but maybe it is better to just take the hit on the non-touch for all the pro's above
- TouchID, wish the non-touch bar had this a lone but oh well.