For the company that has led the world in touch-based interfaces — thanks to the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — it remains a mystery why none of Apple’s Macs have adopted this nifty feature.
Well, perhaps mystery is too strong a term, as Tim Cook and others have justified the approach over the years by claiming in a 2012 earnings call that the addition of touch to the Mac would be akin to a “refrigerator-toaster” – combination, while Steve Jobs suggested in 2010 that using a touch screen Mac would make you feel like “your arm wants to fall off”.
As Jobs explained, “We did a lot of user testing on this… and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives a great demonstration, but after a short time you start to get tired and after a long time your arm wants to fall off.
But does that thinking really make sense? In this article, we’ll take a look at why Apple needs a touchscreen Mac and whether Apple’s idea is that Macs should have touchscreens.
When will Apple release a touchscreen Mac?
As late as 2018, Apple was still pretty clear that it had no plans to introduce a touchscreen Mac. Craig Federighi (Senior Vice President of Software Engineering) told Wired in 2018, “We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac is that your hands rest on a surface and that lifting your arm to get into a poking the screen is quite tiring. thing to do…”
A few years earlier, in 2016, Phil Schiller (senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing) told Wired’s Steven Levi, “We’re thinking about the whole platform… If we did Multi-Touch on the notebook screen, it would are not enough – then the desktop wouldn’t work like that.” And in the same year, in typical minimalist style, Jony Ive (former Chief Design Officer) commented on Cnet that the touch function “wasn’t particularly useful”.
But despite this stance, Apple has made a number of changes over the years that somewhat merge macOS and iPadOS and spark a future where Macs can use a touch interface.
With the arrival of iPadOS 13 and macOS Catalina in 2019, Apple introduced Sidecar, which allows an iPad to become a second screen for your Mac while also adding some touch control to the party. In addition to being able to use your finger to interact with your Mac’s screen mirrored on your iPad, you also have access to Touch Bar controls on the iPad, plus some additional commands. Add an Apple Pencil and you can turn the iPad into a graphics pad for your Mac, with even greater tactile control over macOS apps, such as Logic Pro X, which uses the iPad and iPhone touch interface via the Logic Remote app which turn the mobile devices into control panels that can play and program various music making tools such as Live Loops.
At WWDC 2020, Apple discussed how developers can easily port iOS and iPadOS apps to the Mac using Mac Catalyst’s tools for optimizing the converted apps from the touch interface to the Mac interface. We now have the ability to run iPad and iPhone apps on Macs using Apple’s M-series chips.
Apple has continued to refine and improve this unification of the iPad and Mac to the extent that Universal Control (which arrived in January 2022 with macOS Monterey 12.3 and iPadOS 15.4) allows users to share the same keyboard and mouse between a compatible Mac and iPad while either mirroring their macOS screen or using iPadOS on that iPad.
The integration of the two interfaces is well underway and iPads and Macs have never been closer in terms of power and app compatibility. The flip side of that is that now that we have the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on the Mac, the lack of touch input on the Mac becomes an even more frustrating experience.
Could it be that touch is finally getting to the point where incorporating it into a Mac is less of a fridge/toaster situation and more of “hey, that’s really handy!” one instead? It’s starting to look like it.
In January 2023, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg claimed that a touchscreen MacBook Pro could appear in 2025. If he’s right, it looks like the touchscreen would “support touch input and gestures just like an iPhone or iPad.”
Why Macs need touchscreens and not the Touch Bar
When Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, its primary focus on the touch interface was a disaster. Many users complained about the phone-like experience on their huge desktop screens, and Tim Cook explained the dangers of technological convergence by giving the kitchen utility example mentioned earlier.
While all this may have been true at the time, later developments call this wisdom into question today.
First of all, Windows has gotten a lot better. Microsoft quickly learned from Windows 8’s car crash, implemented design changes in version 8.1, and finally got it right with Windows 10 and devices like the Surface Pro, reinstating primarily a mouse and keyboard approach, but with the addition of touch when you need it. got it.
And that is the important factor. Touch can be an excellent addition to an interface, rather than replacing the existing one. The simple addition of being able to navigate websites by tapping links instead of using a cursor has obvious benefits, aside from the fact that we’re all so used to it on our iPhones and iPads.
Apple has indeed tried to implement some form of touch on MacBooks, but it would probably be fair to say that it failed spectacularly. In 2016, Apple added the Touch Bar to the MacBook Pro. The Touch Bar is/was an OLED strip above the keys that provided function keys relevant to the current app. It was a feature of 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models and is now only available on the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, where its days are probably numbered.
There are many problems with the Touch Bar concept. One is how touch typists have to slow down to use the feature because contextually changing icons can’t build muscle memory in the fingers. There’s also the factor that you can’t see the Touch Bar unless you’re looking down from your screen, at which point you have to take your eyes off what you’re doing. The fact that you don’t have to change your arm position and the ease with which you can scrub through video content are really helpful, but the Touch Bar interrupts a user’s flow and can ultimately be completely ignored in favor of the traditional on-screen controls. screen. It’s no surprise that the concept was a bust.
In many ways, the Touch Bar demonstrates everything Apple got wrong with its take on touch on the Mac. As Macworld’s Leif Johnson puts it so eloquently, Apple really doesn’t want us to think about touchscreen MacBooks: “Apple seems to assume that users don’t want anything other than touch support on their MacBooks, but when I see colleagues and visitors using touchscreen Using Windows laptops in meetings they don’t use them for complicated tasks like cloning textures in Photoshop they don’t usually dive deep into menus and they certainly don’t try to mimic one of Monet’s haystacks instead they usually stand over their laptop and quickly swipe to different parts of a page or open files or links, saving a few seconds of what using a mouse or the trackpad would have taken. the Touch Bar, which has been Apple’s only concession to touch-based interaction on MacBooks to date.”
As a way of approaching touch on a Mac laptop, the Touch Bar is incredibly flawed and really just shows Apple’s lack of understanding of what users want from a touch interface. Neither the Touch Bar, Sidecar, or Universal Control solve the simple problem of wanting to quickly select links on a page or navigate a website seamlessly, as on most Windows 10 laptops and even most Chromebooks. It’s like using a diamond-encrusted sledgehammer to hammer in a nail.
This is all the more curious when you consider that Apple positioned the Pro line as a replacement for your Mac with the mantra “Your next computer isn’t a computer.”
Sure, this is an attractive proposition to some people, but with the laptop performance level found in iPad Pros that are priced similarly to entry-level Macs, yet don’t have the screen sizes to compete with iMacs, it’s rather a niche option than the more obvious one.
Putting a touchscreen in a Mac and giving it the ability to use it when you need it seems like a much better option than trying to squeeze a Mac-like experience into iPadOS. For a company that prides itself on elegant solutions to problems, the Mac’s lack of a touchscreen option now seems more like an ideological sticking point than one that best serves its users.
MacBook Touch Screen: Specifications and Features
According to Gurnam’s January 2023 report (above), the MacBook touchscreen will use OLED technology. analyst Ming Chi Kuo has claimed that Apple’s first MacBooks with OLED displays could arrive in 2024, a year before touchscreen implementation.
Gurman’s report also states that macOS will “probably” be used on these first touchscreen Macs and that the company is not working on combining macOS and iPadOS.
In the meantime, it’s either Macs or iPads, so check out our best Mac or best iPad guide for details on which one to buy.
