Apple released the
first MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar back in 2016 when it adopted an all-USB-C design and introduced the ill-fated butterfly keyboard. The company referred to the Touch Bar with words like "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary."
Apple has long sidestepped the idea of
having a touch screen on the Mac, but the Touch Bar was something that stood out among its heap of prototypes. Touch Bar replaced traditional function keys on MacBook Pro with a multitouch display that could have dynamic controls based on the app running on the screen.
For instance, you could see play/pause and seek controls when watching movies, emoji in Messages, or Tabs and Favorites in Safari when browsing the web. Several Microsoft apps for macOS, such as
Office,
Outlook, and
Skype, were quick to add support for the new hardware. However, it offered
limited support for Windows via Boot Camp by displaying a static row of functional keys.
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