F4 Key on my MacBook Pro Late 2016 with TouchBar doesn't seem to work

I had a similar F4 key no longer working on my 2013 iMac when I upgraded from 10.10.5 to 10.12.3 this week. The Q&A here helped me go looking on my computer and I found two. Look under Systems Preferences / Mission Control. There you have some choices. You can create a Hot Corner. Or you can active the Dashboard switching from 'Off' to choosing 'As Space' or 'As Overlay'.

I've reported this issue to Apple. It's issue 30234592 titled "iTunes stops F4 key from working on 2016 MBP with TouchBar" and references this thread. I encourage you to do the same at https://bugreport.apple.com/problem/viewproblem

I was having the same problem and found out that iTunes was causing this to happen.

When I plug my iPhone7 into the USB-C port it launches iTunes. After that F4 will not work any longer.

When I end iTunes (double check that is not running via Force Quit) F4 will work again.

I'm guessing it's a bug, but I haven't had a chance to call support and report what I found.

Hope that helps you....

For me it's iTunes as well. I independently figured this out before I found this thread.

Once you close iTunes, you can wait about 45 seconds and F4 will start working again. This didn't happen on my mid-2015 MBP, it only started happening with my new 2016 15" MBP with TouchBar.

This is super-annoying, because I use F4 constantly in my Parallels VM when doing software development.

Apparently this has something to do with touchbar driver. There is a process called 'NowPlayingTouchUI' launched, running at background, when iTunes is started. When you press F4 key, you can see this message in the console:

When iTunes exits, NowPlayingTouchUI exits as well, thus F4 key is working again.

I can't seem to find a way to customize iTunes' touch bar. If there is a way, maybe we can adjust the setting there to make it work.

I called Apple Support regarding this and the following solved the issue:

Power off mac

Hold down the keys Command, Alt, P, R. While holding down these keys press Power button briefly. Keep holding Command, Alt, P, R for 30 secs. (screen flashes briefly)

Restart mac

This impacts more than just F4 - I find that with the now playing framework active the ⌥⌘D shortcut to hide/show the dock doesn't work either (although the key does appear to be pressed in the keyboard viewer). That one has been occasionally bugging me for months, I'm glad I found this thread!

I just bought a new MacBook Pro with the TouchBar to replace an old iMac that finally quit. It's my development system and I am a frequent user of function keys in my software development tools.

After struggling a day to get used to the Touchbar and configure it for my needs, I too became a victim of this problem. My F4 key stopped working as well. I realized it stops working when iTunes is running which is unfortunate as I keep iTunes running in the background for music.

Frankly, I'm stunned that Apple has allowed this problem to fester for this long. It is unacceptable to say the least. So long as I don't use iTunes, I'm good but that is a short-term solution. I simply plug my iPhone into my speakers and move on but clearly, that's not the ideal solution.

Are you listening Apple? This this problem apparently has been an issues since the new Touchbar machines were introduced early last year in 2016. It's nearing the end of 2017. How long does it take to resolve this?

Update: Problem is worse. iTunes will disable the F4 key, and will only work again when logging off MacOS or rebooting the system.

Now, I find that playing videos in Safari will also disable the F4 button.

Now, I just discovered today that any videos I download and am playing locally on my MacBook will ALSO disable the F4 key!

So basically, my $3,000 laptop is good for doing my software coding, but ONLY if I DO NOT do anything else on it the entire day!

This has been a problem since day one on the TouchBar MacBooks, and Apple STILL hasn't resolved it?

Thanks a lot Apple. I expected better of your products. It's past my 2-week window to return this so now I'm stuck with a semi-functional machine.

If you do any kind of coding work on your machine, stay as far away as you can from the TouchBar models. Apple doesn't seem to care at all about resolving this issue.

Since I use my MacBook for software development, my solution is to run iTunes in a Windows 10 virtual machine and tell people that I have to run Windows in order for my Mac to run properly. 🙂

And that is what I will continue to tell my MacBook-owning developer friends to do, just to embarrass Apple for taking so long to fix this bug.