MacOS – Touch Bar has blank/void button after Catalina update

macbook promacostouch-barui

After the Catalina update, the Touch Bar shows a void button on the left of the play button at all times as you can see from this screenshot.

Screenshot with void button

As far as I know, the number of buttons that should appear on the minified control strip is 4… why do I have 5?

If I go into the Settings > Extensions > Touch Bar to customise the control strip, there, while I do the customisation the blank button disappears (see second screenshot).

Screenshot during customisation of control strip

Why does this happen?

[Edit] As I was looking at this post, with a Youtube tab opened along this, the void was replaced by this icon, that is usually what appears when you have media playing…. I don't know if this is correlated or not. (See screenshot below)

Icon changed

Best Answer

This is a bug and it's not a new issue. There are several remedies for macOS Catalina:

  • Open Terminal application and run command killall ControlStrip.
  • Open Terminal application and run command sudo pkill TouchBarServer.

Not comfortable running commands in Terminal? Use Activity Monitor to quit TouchBarServer.

Bonus: When you're finished open System Preferences > Extensions > Touch Bar > Customize Control Strip... and use it to replace the right-most button (Siri) with Show Desktop for improved privacy. You'll still be able to access Siri from the expanded strip set but will be less likely to activate Siri on accident while you're trying deleting stuff.

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