Home > News

New MacBook Pros to Reportedly Lose the Touch Bar

By Laura Tucker
Macbook Pros Touch Bar Featured

Are you wondering why you’re seeing “Touch Bar” trending all over? The answer is that it’s been widely reported that Apple is ditching the Touch Bar on upcoming MacBook Pros and that it’s also bringing back the MagSafe charger. How valid are these reports?

The Return of MagSafe

This isn’t the first we have heard of Mag Safe in recent months. It actually made its return with iPhone 12 models, snapping onto the back of the handsets as a charging method. It stood to reason that MagSafe wasn’t going to be isolated to the iPhones.

The MagSafe charger was first introduced to Mac laptops in 2006. It was phased out, however, in favor of USB-C ports to keep up with competitors to both power the laptops and transfer data.

Macbook Pros Touch Bar Magsafe

A return of the MagSafe to the newest MacBook Pros will mean if the cord gets tangled, the laptop won’t come crashing down – instead the charger will simply detach. However, the connectors also had their difficulties, with multiple instances of frayed cables and the connectors breaking off inside the laptops.

It also means the new MacBook Pros will be able to charge at a faster rate, according to the unnamed source who brought this news. It will be similar in design to the long tubular shape of the older connector. Apple, however, will still include USB-C ports on the new laptops.

Macbook Pros Touch Bar Closed

Along with seeing the return of the MagSafe connector, the next MacBook Pros will arrive with 14-inch and 16-inch models and the next-generation Mac processor, the M1 chip. The displays will be brighter, higher-contrast panels.

Goodbye to the Touch Bar

But the return of the MagSafe charger and the other details aren’t what people are talking about. They’re discussing the removal of another feature: the Touch Bar. It made its debut on Apple laptops in 2016. Reputable Apple sources Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman said Apple is planning on removing the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros.

Apple once thought the Touch Bar would be the next great thing. On the top row of the keyboard, this strip is a slim touchscreen that includes customizable controls that change depending on the app being used.

Macbook Pro Touch Bar Function Keys

Kuo said in a research note that the Touch Bar would be replaced with a a row of function keys to match previous models of the MacBook Pros and the current MacBook Air. Gurman claimed Apple tested the mew models of the MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar and also indicated in a tweet that it would not be on the new models.

This has Apple users talking so much that “Touch Bar” started trending on Twitter. Some are heralding this move by Apple while others are mourning the loss of their Touch Bar. These new Touch Bar-less MacBook Pros are due to be launched around the middle of 2021.

If you’re unsure how you feel about the death of the Touch Bar, check out this article to learn the most useful things you can do with the MacBook Pro Touch Bar.

Image Credit: MagSafe by cinz and public domain

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.