Why Apple’s Touch Bar (probably) won’t destroy the Mac’s battery life – CNET

Touch Bar comes to new MacBook Pro

Apple’s new MacBooks replace the old function keys with an interactive, customizable touch strip called the Touch Bar.

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You’re probably wondering if the new MacBook Pro‘s fancy new secondary screen will eat away at the laptop’s battery life.

We are, too. But I wouldn’t worry — several rumors pegged it as an OLED screen, and OLED screen technology can be surprisingly efficient under the right circumstances.

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The Touch Bar secondary screen on the new MacBook Pro.

Apple/Screenshot by Sean Hollister/CNET

Unlike LCD screens, whose individual pixels require a backlight that’s always consuming power unless the screen is completely off, OLED pixels each produce their own light. Portion of an OLED screen that stay black don’t consume any power at all, even if the drive circuitry might use a tiny bit.

When the screen’s totally black, it’s even more efficient. “Since the OS knows when the OLED screen is black, it can also shut down all of the support and drive circuitry for the panel, so the power would be effectively zero,” DisplayMate Technologies head Raymond Soneira tells CNET.

More on Apple’s event

• Apple’s amazing strip show reinvents the laptop keyboard
• Photos from Apple’s Hello Again Mac event
• See all of our Apple event coverage

You might have noticed Apple’s Touch Bar has a black background. That’s no accident, folks.

(For the same reason, if you’ve got a Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel or other OLED phone, you should really try the dark reading mode in Amazon’s Kindle app, or Twitter’s night mode.)

Plus, it could have a special chip that would make an Apple OLED bar more efficient still, according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has an excellent track record for Apple rumors.

Of course, we don’t know for sure how much of a drain the Magic Toolbar might use when it’s lit up with special new buttons for your apps, particularly if they’re animated or bright, but we doubt it’ll be a lot.

We’ll update this post with the official word from Apple as soon as we have it.

Check out all of today’s Apple news here.