EA for detecting if a Mac has a Touch Bar

Now that we have some of the new late-2016 MacBook Pros, we want to be able to see at a glance how many of them are in a fleet. After some back and forth with Ross we came up with a relatively simple extension attribute for Jamf Pro that looks for the Touch Bar Agent as an indicator of a machine being a Touch Bar Mac.


We ran into a caveat with the above EA, though; if a machine has Touché or some other Touch Bar emulator on it the TouchBarAgent and ControlStrip will activate (regardless of the physical presence of the Touch Bar), which would skew reporting.

We went through a few ideas until Ross finally settled upon the following:


A Smart Group based on this criteria may be useful if you want to enforce any policies for the Touch Bar via Configuration Profile, or any first-run settings like putting the screen saver shortcut in the Control Strip. It could also be used to scope fun stuff to your Touch Bar Macs, like TouchSwitcher (shown above), Pac-Bar, Dino, or Touch Bar Piano. Because after all, if you're paying more for the Touch Bar you might as well get some use out of it.