They talk directly to the kernel and can break things. This is one case where I think Apple carried its simplistic design a little bit too far.There are some low level keyboard shortcuts available. All it takes to force a restart of a frozen MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is to press down on the Touch ID button until the device reboots. I had placed my finger on it plenty of times to log in but never actually pushed it. What I didn’t realize is that the Touch ID button at the far right end of the Touch Bar is actually a button – the power button. The login screen was always there when I flipped the display up, and the MBP always went to sleep when I flipped the screen back down. And believe it or not, in the months that I had owned the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, I had never needed to use a power button. The (nearly) invisible power button of the 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. So I started searching for the power button on the MacBook Pro… On old Macs, the power button was useful for a similar method - shutting off the Mac and then turning it back on. On just about every recent Mac I’ve ever owned, there’s a simple method of doing a force restart - just hold down the power button until the machine reboots.

I waited about a half-hour and finally decided it was time to force quit the laptop, reboot, and see if that solved the problem. The next time I looked at the MacBook Pro screen, it was black except for a progress bar that didn’t seem to be making any progress.

I did so and then followed the prompt to log into iCloud. During the installation process, my MacBook Pro restarted several times, and at one point, I was asked to log in. This all happened while I was upgrading the MacBook Pro to macOS 10.13 High Sierra beta 8. Update: Ma– This tip also applies to 2018, 2019, 2020 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 MacBook Air With Touch ID models. Fortunately, I was able to figure it out, so I thought I’d pass along this tip to readers of the Rocket Yard who might also run into this situation.

I have a very embarrassing admission to make: after 33 years of being a Mac user, I was completely stumped when I recently tried to force quit and restart my 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Restart mac with keyboard