MacBook Pro's crazy Touch Bar puts emoji, controls and more right in your keyboard
Apple just changed the MacBook Pro -- and keyboard design -- in a big way. The new signature feature of Apple's high-end laptop is a "Touch Bar" in place of the function keys. The Touch Bar's virtual keys can morph to match the app you're using, which may speed up certain tasks... and certainly turn a few heads at your neighborhood Starbucks.
The world got its first look at the Touch Bar in a splashy video that highlighted some of its features, including an emoji toolbar. It'll be a feature on the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros, though Apple will offer a 13-inch MacBook Pro with traditional function keys as well.
The Touch Bar functions like any Apple touch display: It has "Retina" resolution, responds to gestures and has multi-touch functionality, supporting up to 10 fingers.
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The virtual keys on the Touch Bar adapt to whatever app you're using, and can even move. For typing emoji, for example, it will call up a strip of emoji, with broader categories on the left and specific emoji on the right. Tap one of the categories, and the bar changes before your eyes.
The application-specific buttons on the Touch Bar can include UI elements that go beyond simple keys. For Apple's Photos app, the Touch Bar can lets you easily flip through photos or scrub through videos with your finger. In Safari, the Touch Bar can let you quickly switch between open tabs.
The Touch Bar can also assist with precision controls in creative apps. In Apple's Final Cut Pro, it can show a timeline so you can use your finger to slide through a project timeline. With a tap, it switches to show editing controls.
Users will also be able to customize the Touch Bar. Similar to Finder windows, you can drag and drop specific buttons onto the bar from the main screen, via the trackpad.
One of the benefits of the Touch Bar is to have app-specific controls available while working in full-screen mode. In Photoshop, you could expand a photo to full screen while making precise adjustments to things like hue and saturation.
The Touch Bar fulfills a similar promise to the Microsoft Surface Dial. Both are technology meant to complement high-end computers to assist creatives. Microsoft, however, will be releasing Touch Bar controls for its Office apps, Apple announced.
Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller joked that the audience should have a moment of "requiem" for the function keys, which have been a feature of many computers since the IBM PCs of the 1980s.
Rumors about the MacBook Pro keyboard getting a touch bar have been circulating since the spring. In May, a report from KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, typically a reliable Apple prognosticator, suggested the touch bar would be the highlight of a MacBook Pro revamp, and since then many others supported that prediction, culminating in an apparent leak from Apple itself.
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
