Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

The new design of the MacBook Pros is nice, and Apple’s decision to put in nothing but Thunderbolt 3 ports has prompted a fresh wave of dongle talk, but the signature feature of the new MacBook Pros was always going to be the Touch Bar.

This little touch-enabled strip represents a bunch of things. It’s a melding of Apple’s traditional Intel-driven software platform and the company’s own homegrown chips and its touch-driven iOS platform. It’s Apple’s answer to the touchscreen, a model that Apple steadfastly resists in its computers even as Microsoft and its partners embrace it. And it's the biggest thing about these Macs that’s truly new—Macs in the last half-decade have gotten thinner and lighter and have better battery life than before, but, Touch Bar aside, they all still run basically the same software in basically the same way.

So, yes, these new laptops have new CPUs and GPUs, new designs, new ports, and new screens. We’ll spend plenty of time with all of those things. But the biggest question for buyers is whether the Touch Bar is worth it and what it adds to the experience that you can’t already get if you keep the latest version of macOS installed on your laptop.