Ming-Chi Kuo, a reliable supply chain analyst for TF International Securities, predicts a bold new class of MacBook Pros this year with MagSafe charging and I/O ports that won’t require dongles. What Kuo doesn’t forecast is a future for the Touch Bar, the strip of touchscreen panel Apple added to the MacBook Pro in 2016. Love or hate the Touch Bar, that’s a bad thing.
A major investment
When the Touch Bar first debuted on the MacBook Pro, Jason Snell and John Gruber correctly argued that the investment in a brand new interface on the Mac countered the notion that the Mac was a dead platform.
“For people who say Apple doesn’t care about the Mac, they built this whole new bit of hardware, and then they updated all these Mac apps to support it. That was a lot of work,” Snell declared.
“There’s the hardware engineering work of actually putting an embedded iOS device into the keyboard with this system-on-a-chip and having a way that it can interface with the Intel side,” Gruber replied.
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