The future of the Touch Bar was thrown into doubt earlier this month thanks to separate reports from Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The former said that the touch-sensitive strip was definitely being removed, while the latter said Apple was considering it.
There doesn’t seem to be any real consensus view of the Touch Bar, making it a tough call for Apple, but one Apple patent does describe a possible compromise approach that takes the company some way toward a fully dynamic keyboard …
Background
Apple introduced the Touch Bar as part of a MacBook Pro refresh in 2016. There were a lot of objections to the loss of the physical Escape key – a problem Apple solved in a later update – but in general there didn’t seem to be much agreement about whether or not it was a worthwhile feature.
Some dismissed it as a gimmick, some loved it, but the majority of MacBook Pro owners feel between the two – viewing it as ok but not a must-have.
For my own part, I was somewhat skeptical, did end up kind of liking it – but not really feeling like it justified the likely cost. Two years in, I concluded that I wouldn’t pay a single penny extra for the feature if given the choice. The majority of you, owners and not, agreed with me.
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