Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Check out Apple’s touchy new OLED bar mounted in the new MacBook Pro laptops

Kevin Parrish
By

During Apple’s press conference on Thursday, the company revealed the new long-rumored 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models sporting sleek, thin form factors. As we have seen in rumors over the last several months, these laptops feature an embedded OLED touch-capable bar residing above the keyboard. This bar focuses on keeping the user’s hands on the keyboard, providing shortcuts and other tools for creating and manipulating media and information in many MacOS applications.

While we do not have the dimensions of Apple’s Touch Bar feature just yet, it expands from one end of the keyboard to the other. The right side has a touch-based power button that includes a fingerprint sensor, equipping the new MacBooks with Apple’s Touch ID security service. This sensor is backed by Apple’s new T1 chip.

Recommended Videos

So what can you do with Apple’s new Touch Bar? In one demonstration, the company revealed how MacBook owners could quickly compose a document or email, providing simple touch-based controls like making text bold, changing the font color, and more. Essentially, users can manage documents and emails using the huge trackpad with one hand, and alter specific details using the other hand on the Touch Bar. Users can even send an email by merely pressing the command icon on the new OLED strip.

Related

In Messages, customers can quickly browse through a library of emoji to choose the appropriate response, or pull up the most-used emoji thus far. There are even means to provide a quick response if users currently have no time to write a complete message, such as loading up a thumbs-up icon and more. Again, there is seemingly no mouse movement involved — both hands are glued to the keyboard area, eliminating the need for an added peripheral.

In Safari, Apple’s web browser provides quick navigation features for the Touch Bar. For instance, it will display thumbnails of all the open tabs that web surfers can scroll through and select. There is also a “plus” button for opening a new tab and means for loading the user’s favorite sites in one horizontal listing. Apple Pay customers can also make secure purchases online through Safari by placing their finger on the Touch ID button.

Video and photo manipulation on the new MacBook Pros got easier too. Thanks to the Touch Bar, users can play video forward and backward with the slide of a finger across the narrow OLED strip. Images can be fully rotated and quickly leveled with a simple touch, while the lighting can be adjusted, effects and filters can be applied, and so on. There is even a virtual button to see the before and after states of the edited image.

Next, in Finder, the Touch Bar enables users to easily tag files. This app provides Touch Bar customization too, allowing users to drag specific virtual buttons on the screen down to the OLED strip, such as screenshot controls and more.

Overall, the Touch Bar is integrated throughout the system and in Apple’s first-party programs to make the MacBook Pro more accessible, productive, and manageable. Owners can use Touch Bar to answer calls in FaceTime, control music playback in iTunes, manage documents in Pages, Keynote, and Videos, control instruments in GarageBand, and even use it in Terminal.

In addition to supporting first-party services, Touch Bar can also be used in third-party programs, such as Adobe Photoshop. In one demonstration, the user could throw Photoshop into full-screen mode and move the necessary toolbars down into the Touch Bar. It could be used to adjust the hardness of a brush, the opacity of a color, and so on. Thus, the touchpad can be used to paint while your other hand makes all the needed adjustments. Scroll and tap to adjust blending, or scroll through the edit history by sliding left and right. Support for Touch Bar will be added to Photoshop before the end of 2016.

Another on-stage demo used Djay Pro, a professional solution for disc jockeys, which will include full-core functionality on the Touch Bar later in 2016. For instance, DJs can apply a filter in real time while the music plays, adjust the waveforms of each track, and even use the OLED strip to scratch virtual vinyl. Instruments can be added in real time, reverb and echo turned on and off, among other effects.

Apple said Microsoft will provide Touch Bar support for its Office suite soon, even Skype for Business. Other programs mentioned included the Affinity Designer software, the Sketch professional design software for Mac, and DaVinci Resolve.

Hopefully, we will have more on the Touch Bar specs soon. What we know is that it supports 10-point touch input so users can execute multiple commands with both hands on the OLED strip. In any case, Apple made a huge move with the addition of this feature, just as it did by providing one of the first commercially available mice decades ago.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kevin Parrish
Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
The MacBook Air 15 vs. MacBook Pro 14: the easy way to decide
Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air placed on a desk with its lid closed.

Picking out a new MacBook isn't as easy as it used to be.

The hardest choice in the lineup might be between the 15-inch MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Both are now offered with the same M3 chip, despite there being a $300 difference in the base models. But when similarly configured, there's actually only a $100 difference between these two laptops.

Read more
I needed to buy a new MacBook. Here’s why I bought a power bank instead
Baseus Blade 2 65W power bank for laptops kept on a green couch.

I rely on a 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020 for most of my work. Despite its age and being a base variant model, it continues to stack up well against my expectations for all these years.

Since MacBooks are known for longevity, the fact that my MacBook Pro still holds up well a few years later shouldn't sound surprising. However, the first signs of aging recently arrived in the form of a warning about the battery's plummeting health. I was already dreading the idea of having to replace what was otherwise a perfectly good laptop.

Read more
Apple quietly backtracks on the MacBook Air’s biggest issue
The MacBook Air on a white table.

The new MacBook Air with M3 chip not only allows you to use it with two external displays, but it has also reportedly addressed a storage problem that plagued the previous M2 model. The laptop now finally has much faster storage performance since Apple has switched back to using two 128GB NAND modules instead of a single 256GB module on the SSD drive.

This was discovered by the YouTuber Max Tech, who tore down the entry-level model of the MacBook Air M3 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. In his tests, thanks to the two NAND modules, the M3 MacBook Air is nearly double faster than the M2 MacBook Air. Blackmagic Disk Speed tests show that the older M2 model with the problematic NAND chip had a 1584.3 Mb/s write speed, and the newer M3 model had 2108.9 Mb/s for the M3 model, for a 33% difference. In read speeds, it was 1576.4 Mb/s on the old model and 2880.2 Mb/s on the newer model.

Read more