The touchbar is a nice feature of the Macbook when used as multimedia machine because it could be individually programmed. Unfortunately it has been abandoned may for reasons unknown to us. At least it starts now flickering at random intervals in my 2019 Macbook Pro. And nothing helps in the long-term
- resetting SMC
- restting NVRAM, PRAM
- terminal kill touchbar
- terminal kill control strip
- pmset hibernate mode
- upgrade to Sonoma
while only kill touchbar disables it immediately . Could it be a combined hardware / software issue?
- a slowly expanding battery moving the keyboard lid?
- some defect of the light sensor?
- a defect when starting the OLED display?
While I can’t fully exclude a minimal battery expansion after 200 cycles, the battery is still marked as OK in the system report. The flickering can be stopped by a bright light at the camera hole on top of the display so the second option is also unlikely.
With the Medium hack it is gone during daytime but still occurs sometimes during sleep which is annoying. It seems that even the dedicated Hide My Bar app is only an user-level application that doesn’t have the permissions needed to disable the Touch Bar in lock screen.
Completely disabling the touchbar will not possible as there is no other ESC key. The touchbar there may need replacement as recommended by Apple or just tape on top of it.