A fresh report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that Apple is set to ditch the Touch Bar with the next iteration of MacBook Pro. According to Gurman, the company is set to unveil redesigned MacBook Pros later this year. The 13” MacBook Pro will reportedly be replaced by a new 14.1” MacBook Pro with smaller bezels. The 16” MacBook Pro will also receive a design refresh.
The design of the 13” MacBook Pro has remained unchanged since 2016 when the company unveiled the Touch Bar models with butterfly keyboard. In 2020, Apple replaced the butterfly keyboard with a much more reliable scissor switch mechanism keyboard – “Magic Keyboard”. The Touch Bar remains to be the expensive and useless part of the laptop which most people do not like.
Revolutionary or useless?
In 2016, Apple touted the Touch Bar as revolutionary but it has not aged well. Initial impressions of the Touch Bar were extremely positive but with the promise of usefulness in the future as Apple and developers build more use-cases. However, the Touch Bar has not been able to hold onto the promise, the company made four years ago..
The popular tech YouTuber MKBHD tweeted that, based on the replies he received on a Twitter post, 75% of the MacBook Pro users “hate” everything about the Touch Bar, 20% never used the Touch Bar, and 5% of the users find the Touch Bar useful. It’s clear that the majority of the MacBook Pro users do not like the Touch Bar and the removal of the touch screen strip will be joyous.
In the early days of the Touch Bar MacBook Pro models, it was reported that the touchscreen strip costs approximately $300. If Apple replaces the Touch Bar with a standard set of function keys on the next version of MacBook Pro, the price of the product could also reduce.