MacBook Pro's crazy Touch Bar puts emoji, controls and more right in your keyboard

Apple just changed the MacBook Pro — and keyboard design — in a big way. The new signature feature of Apple's high-end laptop is a "Touch Bar" in place of the function keys. The Touch Bar's virtual keys can morph to match the app you're using, which may speed up certain tasks... and certainly turn a few heads at your neighborhood Starbucks.

The world got its first look at the Touch Bar in a splashy video that highlighted some of its features, including an emoji toolbar. It'll be a feature on the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros, though Apple will offer a 13-inch MacBook Pro with traditional function keys as well.

The Touch Bar functions like any Apple touch display: It has "Retina" resolution, responds to gestures and has multi-touch functionality, supporting up to 10 fingers.

The virtual keys on the Touch Bar adapt to whatever app you're using, and can even move. For typing emoji, for example, it will call up a strip of emoji, with broader categories on the left and specific emoji on the right. Tap one of the categories, and the bar changes before your eyes.

The application-specific buttons on the Touch Bar can include UI elements that go beyond simple keys. For Apple's Photos app, the Touch Bar can lets you easily flip through photos or scrub through videos with your finger. In Safari, the Touch Bar can let you quickly switch between open tabs.

The Touch Bar can also assist with precision controls in creative apps. In Apple's Final Cut Pro, it can show a timeline so you can use your finger to slide through a project timeline. With a tap, it switches to show editing controls.

Users will also be able to customize the Touch Bar. Similar to Finder windows, you can drag and drop specific buttons onto the bar from the main screen, via the trackpad.

One of the benefits of the Touch Bar is to have app-specific controls available while working in full-screen mode. In Photoshop, you could expand a photo to full screen while making precise adjustments to things like hue and saturation.

The Touch Bar fulfills a similar promise to the Microsoft Surface Dial. Both are technology meant to complement high-end computers to assist creatives. Microsoft, however, will be releasing Touch Bar controls for its Office apps, Apple announced.

Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller joked that the audience should have a moment of "requiem" for the function keys, which have been a feature of many computers since the IBM PCs of the 1980s.

Rumors about the MacBook Pro keyboard getting a touch bar have been circulating since the spring. In May, a report from KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, typically a reliable Apple prognosticator, suggested the touch bar would be the highlight of a MacBook Pro revamp, and since then many others supported that prediction, culminating in an apparent leak from Apple itself.