16 MACWORLD SEPTEMBER 2020
MACUSER WILL THE TOUCH BAR SURVIVE?improve it, making me wonder if even
Apple has truly embraced the thing.
By the end of this year, Apple will begin
rolling out those new Macs. Sooner or
later, the Intel MacBook Pro will be
replaced with a model running on Apple
silicon. Here’s the big question: Does that
laptop have a Touch Bar at all? And if so,
will it be the same...or different?
THE OLD TOUCH BAR CAN’T
SURVIVE
Powered by the T-series processors in
modern MacBook Pros, the Touch Bar is a
little part of the Mac interface that has
been running Apple silicon since it was
introduced. The silicon is also running its
own operating system called BridgeOS,
which is apparently based on watchOS.
The Mac and the Touch Bar talk to each
other, but in many ways they’re two
separate computers.
Apple has spent the last few years
offloading a bunch of Mac functions onto
the T2 chip (go.macworld.com/ofld), doing
things in uniquely Apple ways that
wouldn’t have been possible using Intel’s
processors and chipsets. That’s all very
clever, but once Macs are running entirely
on Apple silicon, they won’t need the T
anymore—the main processor can take on
all those jobs.
So what happens to the Touch Bar? If
Apple wants to keep it going, it probably
needs to re-architect how the Touch Bar
works, to run on the same processor as
the rest of the Mac. This might be good for
the Touch Bar, in that it could be deeply
integrated into
macOS for the first
time, rather than
running at a remove
via BridgeOS.
Perhaps Apple
is satisfied that the
Touch Bar is exactly
what it needs to be,
and will put in the
work to rebuild the
Touch Bar to
behave exactly on
Apple Silicon as it
Does an Apple silicon MacBook Pro still need a T2 chip? does on modern