Chosen Solution
Hi! Yesterday, I swapped all my internal components myself into a brand new upper case purchased from iFixit due to a dead keyboard, backlights, and touch bar. The repair went perfectly, and all components are now working—except the touch bar. Prior to the repair, the touch bar was completely dead, TouchBarServer couldn’t be found in Activity Monitor, and all touch bar options were missing in System Preferences. Post repair, its display is still blank and its options are still missing in System Preferences, but the TouchBarServer process is back in Activity Monitor. Its options are still missing in System Preferences. The upper case I purchased came with a new touch bar and it’s cable pre-installed. Computer is 2017 13” MBP w Touch Bar (A1706). Is there something I am needing to repair here? Or could this just be a Big Sur beta software bug? Are there any fixes for that?
For anyone attempting to find a solution for this, here it is: Unfortunately, by the hands of Apple, there is no simple solution for this other than having your logic board itself fixed. The problem is the Touch Bar is unable to install its needed firmware (as it runs independent of macOS on something known as embeddedOS), and thus will not work. Ended up shipping mine out to an independent fixer (PowerbookMedic), where they diagnosed that the problem with my Touch Bar’s inability to download its firmware was a T1 chip that needs complete replacing. Total is about $300, which is much better than the $1k I was looking at if I decided to replace the entire board with all of my soldered on customizations (3.5 gHz, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB storage, etc etc). So sorry there isn’t anything easier.
What I can tell you you likely still have a hardware level issue. I would review the connections and make sure you also try resetting the SMC & NVRAM.
