Detail from the patent showing an image of a surprised rabbit perhaps being edited using the smaller displays by the keyboard
Unbelievably, it was 2016 when Apple first introduced the Touch Bar, the touch-sensitive display that sat atop MacBook Pro keyboards. For something that looked good but didn’t really catch on, it lasted a long time, too.
But the end of the Touch Bar in October 2023 may not truly be its final demise. While the Touch Bar was not in any way updated during its seven years on the market, a newly-granted patent shows that it was only part of a plan to make more use of the base of a laptop. Called “Portable Computer With Dynamic Display Interface,” it describes a laptop with “a light-transmissive cover defining a first touch-sensitive input region along a first side of the keyboard and a second touch-sensitive input region along a second side of the keyboard.”