The Apple company sells the new MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar without protection against viruses, or at least this is the situation for certain models received by customers. More precisely, we are talking about the System Integrity Protection, SIP system, which is disabled on certain units received by customers who ordered them from the company.
Apple has implemented this system since OS X El Capitan, with the role of protecting Macs against viruses by restricting the permissions that the root user has. Moreover, it prevents unauthorized access to protected files and folders, so that a virus could not take control of the Mac and spread.
System Integrity Protection, SIP, works in the background, without the user knowing, and is automatically activated on Macs that have OS X El Capitan, or a newer version, less the new MacBook Pros. No one has an explanation for the fact that this system is disabled, but users who do not have it active are vulnerable to attacks.
It is not known why there are intermittent activation of this system on the new MacBook Pros, a clear cause of the problem has not yet been discovered. Interested users can check if the system is active by typing the command csrutil status in the Terminal application available in OS X or macOS operating systems.
Apple is aware of the problem and will surely solve it in a macOS update.
The consensus seems to be that some (but not all) Touch Bar models are shipping with SIP disabled. No reports of a non-Touch Bar/Escape doing so
- Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 17, 2016
