Chosen Solution
I’m interested in finding out from anyone that has looked at the mbp touch bar & not touch bar internals, if it would be possible to have the chassis body machined to allow for swapping in the non touch bar keyboard? Basically I want to restore the physical function keys from a sanely designed (non touch bar) laptop. Is there enough space? What cabling would I need to create or modify to do this? I’m sure there will be issues with the firmware to accomplish this. I think it would be an interesting academic exercise to sniff the bus and see what we could do to work around that. At this point I’m wanting to dig up any specs, schematics, first hand knowledge or any other helpful information for this project. If it seems promising, I’m willing to take this further. Imagine how cool it would be to have a frankenmac keyboard mod kit, lol.
As you can see, entirely different machines. MacBook Pro 13" Function Keys Late 2016 Teardown MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar Teardown I don’t believe this will be possible, Apple has to squeeze everything into such tiny space, therefore practically left zero space for any modifications and parts have to be custom made for each model.
there is probably a board under there, which is probably heavily screwed or glued on, the oled panel itself is also glued on, macOS would probably give you an error since it wouldn’t be able to detect the touch id sensor so you would probably have to reroute many cables, which might not even be possible
I wonder if you even need to alter the chassis. The MacBook Air keyboard might simply fit, and the connector for the real keyboard portion of the MBP may be the same.
In keyboard options there’s a checkbox to permanently make the function keys stay on the touchbar. all it does is swap over the fn functionality so that instead of showing you the fun keys it shows you the touchbar instead. theres no way to physically swap out the touchbar though, just the software option to get them back permanently or app specific. I customised mine so I’m happy with it, i hardily used the function keys anyway for most apps so it’s a welcome change that needs some more software tweaks I think.
The dumb emoji bar sucks even if you have it set to show function keys all the time. It still “sleeps,” so you have to hit it twice to reveal the Escape key (for example). Also, Apple’s baffling ignorance of the Delete key continues… you can’t even add a legit Delete key to the emoji bar, even though it’s a strip of soft keys! WTF!
