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Early MacBook Pro adopters confused by misidentified graphics in System Profiler

If you're a proud owner of a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, you may be wondering why macOS's System Profiler application identifies the GPU as Intel Iris Pro 580 integrated graphics vs. Intel HD Graphics 530, as advertised on Tech Specs webpage.

No, Apple did not accidentally put the wrong GPU in the new MacBook Pro—a company source explains that the problem stems from an error in the System Information database causing the app to misidentify the GPU.

Teardown confirms both 13″ and 15″ Touch Bar MacBook Pros have non-removable SSDs

iFixit on Friday published its teardown analysis of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (model number A1707), just two days after taking a peek under the hood of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Comparing the two Touch Bar-equipped notebooks to the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, which iFixit also disassembled, the repair site has confirmed that only the baseline 13-incher with a standard row of function keys has a removable SSD.

Check out “Bulb,” Apple’s first TV ad for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

The new MacBook Pro hasn't even shipped to everyone who have pre-ordered it, but on Thursday Apple began airing its very inaugural television commercial. Aptly titled "Bulb," the video runs one minute and 37 seconds long and frames the expensive notebook as a tool "for ideas to come".

"Ideas have always pushed the world forward," Apple says in the ad. "Introducing a tool for all the ideas to come. The new MacBook Pro."

Mac Automation Product Manager Sal Soghoian leaves Apple

Beloved engineer and evangelist Sal Soghoian has announced that he is no longer employed by Apple. He says the move is the result of the company eliminating his position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies for "business reasons."

Soghoian is a software developer that has been at Apple since 1997. During his tenure, he advanced a wide range of user automation technologies including UNIX CLI, JavaScript, AppleScript, Automator, and scripting support for several stock apps.

How to take screenshots of the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

If you take screenshots on your Mac, you may wonder if macOS supports screenshotting the Touch Bar. The default Shift (⇧)-Command (⌘)-3 keyboard shortcut captures a screenshot of everything shown on the display, sans the Touch Bar.

With macOS 10.12.2, Apple has implemented a brand new shortcut specifically designed for taking screenshots of the Touch Bar.

Here's what you need to know about capturing everything that's shown on the Touch Bar as an image file on your computer. You'll also learn how to save Touch Bar screenshots to the clipboard for pasting in other apps and how to add screenshot-taking shortcuts as buttons to the Touch Bar itself.

Teardown of 13″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar reveals “cosmetic” speaker grilles, other tidbits

After disassembling the base 13-inch MacBook Pro model without the Touch Bar, teardown wizards over at iFixit have now taken apart Apple’s Touch Bar-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro. From the inside, it’s an entirely different computer with a totally different design that has more in common with its 15-inch brethren. Among other things, the teardown analysis has found that the external speaker grilles in the top half of the case exist mostly for “cosmetic” purposes.

That's because the improved sound is being projected from a pair of air vents on the sides of the case. By comparison, the base 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar does push sound through the speaker grilles as it lacks the air vents.

Other differences between the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and its cheaper 13-inch variant that lacks the Touch Bar include a differently laid out internal components to make room for the Touch Bar itself which, by the way, is hard to replace.

New MacBook Pro with Touch Bar begins trickling in to select Apple stores

Just 24 hours after first shipments began arriving to customers, Apple's new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is now available for purchase at select company-run retail stores in the U.S., China and elsewhere.

According to reports on Reddit, MacRumors, AppleInsider and other outlets, a select number of flagship Apple retail locations have received stock and are now offering limited quantities of the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Pixelmator for Mac gains Touch Bar and P3 color support, tabs, full Sierra compatibility & more

Popular Photoshop alternative Pixelmator for Mac was updated in the Mac App Store today with a bunch of new features, including support for tabbed image editing on Sierra and custom shortcuts on the new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar, universal clipboard for effortless pasting of content between devices and other Sierra-specific features. Plus, you get more than a dozen improvements like the new content-aware Smart Refine and Refine Selection tools, support for wide color images and displays and more.

Try out the new Touch Bar on any Mac with Touché

The Touch Bar is an exciting new feature that comes with the higher end MacBook Pro Apple unveiled last month, but you don't have to buy a new MacBook Pro to experiment with the Touch Bar resources that come baked into macOS on every Mac.

Last week we showed you a way to simulate the Touch Bar experience with a third-party app that utilizes the resources already in macOS, and now, another app called Touché is bringing a cleaner implementation of the Touch Bar simulator to all Macs.

Reviewers weigh in on the new MacBook Pro…

As first customers begin to receive the new MacBook Pro, reviews of the long-expected hardware refresh to Apple's Pro notebook family hit the web this morning. Depending on the reviewer, the Touch Bar feature is either a gimmick or a productivity-boosting addition.

As for performance, the reviews are mixed: some people are saying that a lot faster SSD and RAM make the machine super snappy and others note Intel's Skylake chips barely push performance forward versus 2013 or later MacBook Pros.

Apple spent years testing if touchscreens made sense on the Mac

As first reviews of the new MacBook Pro hit the web this morning, Apple's marketing boss Phil Schiller took to Backchannel to dispel some of the myths saying his company has been stubbornly dismissive of the idea of a touchscreen Mac for no apparent reason. Schiller reveals that Apple has actually spent years testing if touchscreens made sense on the Mac before realizing that touching things on a 27-inch screen quickly becomes “absurd”.