Has anyone ever managed to remove the touchbar from an old macbook and replace it with a row of physical keys?

@flauschzelle accessing those keyboards at all is a pain (they're under the entire computer and riveted to the case) so that sounds like an excercise in frustration, and also the chip that runs the touchbar also does important system stuff and would probably become very unhappy

@noiob
Urgs, that's what I suspected :/

So it seems I'm gonna have to throw away a laptop that otherwise works fine, just because it's built to not be repairable?
*sigh* I know why I would never have bought this thing (I literally only have it because I got it for free).

Anyone who is not bothered by flickering lights wanna swap against an equally old non-touchbar macbook? 😅

@noiob
Or any tips for just removing the backlight from the touchbar maybe? I don't care if it stays dark, as long as it keeps staying dark when it goes into "standby" then.

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@flauschzelle no idea, beyond hardware modification ofc

if it helps, you can apparently remove most things on the touch bar, it'll at least flicker less then idownloadblog.com/2023/03/09/h

you could put tape over it albeit that might put pressure on your screen with Apple's famously tight tolerances

obvs you can use a MacBook while it's closed with an external screen connected, if that's an option

@noiob
Thanks, I'll have a look at this.. though I'm not sure if removing things in software will do anything about the "flickering"... it's flashing bright white every few seconds *when it's in standby*, so that has nothing to do with the content shown on the touchbar's screen.

@flauschzelle oh, my bad, somehow I thought the backlight was flickering, not the LCD

@noiob
I don't know which light it is exactly 🤷‍♀️

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