Chosen Solution
Hello everyone, My MBP after 6 months from purchase had a very small segment of touchbar going off (touch was still working in that area):
Before bringing it to Apple Care, it magically went back to normal so I just forgot. Now, 5 months after out of warranty, a larger part of the touchbar is off, with touch still working..
Do you think I could try to check some cables or similar inside the Mac before giving up and prepare to spend a lot of money? [I won’t of course… will leave without touchbar] thanks!
Let’s visualize how the display works… Its like a spreadsheet! a bunch of rows and in this case a ton of columns! So the more right columns are being dropped! While not obvious the display lines all go to the far left edge (the other side from the power button). So these column lines have to travel to this point and then go into a driver chip and then a ribbon cable connects to a controller board and then to logic board below it. Here’s what it looks like:
The Blue outlined chip is the controller and on the right of it is the driver. Apple doesn’t replace the touch bar which I suspect is damaged here. All they do is replace the full upper case. which is a lot more expensive! For reference iFixit has the older version MacBook Pro 15" Retina (Late 2016-2017) Touch Bar Assembly which only costs $55 Vs the uppercase $530. Sadly, I haven’t found out if the older TB works in the newer 2018/19 models yet.
