MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (2016)

The 2016 MacBook Pro represented the most radical redesign of Apple's professional laptop since the original unibody switch, and it proved to be one of the most polarizing Macs of the decade. The headline feature was the Touch Bar, a slim OLED touch strip replacing the physical function key row, capable of showing context-sensitive controls, from video scrubbing to emoji pickers to Photoshop tool shortcuts, and it was paired with a Touch ID sensor that doubled as a physical power button, bringing fingerprint authentication and Apple Pay support to the Mac for the first time. The chassis itself was dramatically thinner and lighter than its predecessor, driven by Intel Skylake Core i5 and i7 processors and a bank of four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports that replaced every legacy port, including, controversially, the traditional USB-A, HDMI, SD card slot, and MagSafe connector, forcing an entire professional user base into a drawer full of dongles seemingly overnight. The new butterfly-mechanism keyboard, refined from the 12-inch MacBook's first attempt, offered a shallower, more clicky typing feel that divided users immediately, and would go on to become the most notorious reliability problem in modern Mac history, as dust and crumbs lodged beneath the low-travel switches caused sticking or unresponsive keys for a meaningful fraction of owners, eventually prompting an Apple extended repair program and years of class-action lawsuits. Despite the keyboard troubles, the Touch Bar models sold well to a design and creative crowd drawn to the sleeker chassis and brighter, wider-gamut display, even as many professional users, particularly developers and writers who valued a reliable physical Escape key and function row, gravitated toward the simultaneously released non-Touch-Bar 13-inch model instead. History has been fairly unkind to this generation: the Touch Bar itself never achieved the third-party app support Apple hoped for and was eventually dropped in 2021, while the butterfly keyboard's failures became a defining cautionary tale about sacrificing durability for thinness, directly motivating Apple's return to scissor-switch Magic Keyboards by 2019-2020.