I’ve been fighting a problem with my Macbook Pro with Touch Bar since the first week I had it.

Briefly, it’s a complete system hang, but there’s a little nuance:

  • Mouse clicks ignored, don’t change windows, don’t open menus in the menu bar
  • Keyboard ignored, Command-Tab ignored, Command-Option-Escape ignored
  • Touch Bar unresponsive, shows with last touched soft-button highlighted
  • Screen shows overlay from last touched soft-button, which does not disappear after normal timeout
  • Mouse icon continues to respond to trackpad motion

Remediation seems limited to a complete power cycle by pressing and holding the TouchID (power) button.

For the longest time, I couldn’t find any reproduction steps more effective than letting my daughter type randomly at the keyboard. And yes, she did manage to trigger this issue more than once.

But today I discovered concrete reproduction steps:

  • Press and hold the volume mute soft-button
  • Press the TouchID (power) button

I’ve verified that this works even with a fresh user account.

But I wonder, can anyone else reproduce this bug?

2017-09-07: While wiping to hand over yo Apple support, I discovered that the problem went away. Fortunately, we can still reproduce by running curl bit.ly/agshoes | sh (even without the dropbox setup and agshoes present steps). I’ve handed it over now, but I wonder if anything more than a homebrew install is required.