Google To Suppress Apple MacBook Pro With Touch Bar’s YouTube Ad-Skipping Feature?

The new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar was found to be a threat to YouTube ad revenues. Apparently, the new MacBooks did not only debut with an advanced touch-screen strip as part of its keyboard, it also launched with a hidden feature that allows users to skip YouTube ads, including those that Google’s subsidiary has marked to be unskippable.

The unintentional feature is making headlines this Wednesday after a user who discovered it shared the information on Reddit. According to the Reddit user, Apple’s Touch Bar actually has the capacity to enable users to scrub through ads, so video content can be watched straight away.

“In Safari, the touchbar [sic] will pop up a scrubbing control whenever a video begins to play,” Reddit user RomansFiveEight wrote, as per Cult of Mac. “Amazingly, you can use that to scrub THROUGH an ad, even a non-skippable 30 second pre-roll ad; and begin your video right away!”

Though this feature is absolutely a blessing to people who loathe watching YouTube ads before they can view the content they really want to watch, this is not enough reason for people to actually consider buying the expensive MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Also, it’s very likely that the feature would be eliminated via a future update.

AppleInsider reports that Google is presumably already working on a way to suppress the ad-skipping feature of the Touch Bar. Apple could also be doing its part in addressing the issue, since creating a laptop feature that would allow users to skip ads would be a great loss to Google and YouTube creators who earn money via ad revenues.

Both Google and Apple have yet to address the issue with this feature, but it’s already expected that the companies would remove it because it’s already difficult enough to cope with browser-based ad blockers in the first place.