If you’re reading this article on a MacBook, reach out and touch your screen for a moment. Tap on some tabs or act like you’re selecting text or zooming in on a photo.
What did you feel ? Not great, right? The screen moved, it was neither intuitive nor effective, and everything was better when the hand came back to rest on the keyboard. There’s a reason laptop design hasn’t really changed much in the past 20 years. It’s perfect for what it does.
And the MacBook is the pinnacle of that perfection. Whether you’re using a 16-inch MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, the design, form factor and build quality are superb, it’s incredibly comfortable and the Force Touch trackpad is brilliant. Now that the butterfly nightmare is over, the keyboard feels fantastic and comfortable, and even the 16-inch model is light enough to carry anywhere.
While there’s certainly room for improvement – a better webcam, Face ID, 5G support, and of course longer battery life – the latest rumor that Apple is working on adding from a touch screen to the MacBook doesn’t excite me. Quite the contrary, in fact: I think it would make the MacBook worse.
Look but don’t touch
If you look at the most capable touchscreen PCs, they have one thing in common: they turn into tablets. Typing on a screen that has a hinge doesn’t make for a good experience. That’s why Apple’s Magic Keyboard has a “cantilever floating design” and Microsoft’s Surface has a kickstand. Simply popping up a touchscreen on a MacBook Air won’t be enough.
I’m confident enough to say that Apple won’t add a kickstand to the MacBook. So that leaves two options for turning an existing MacBook into a touchscreen device: build a hinge strong enough to withstand knocks and pinches without moving, or create a MacBook display that can rotate 180 degrees or fold like the Surface Laptop. Studio. Either decision would categorically change what the MacBook is, probably add a few hundred dollars to the price, and essentially create a whole new class of device that might not be better than what we have now.
Apple could do something similar to the Surface Laptop Studio with a touchscreen MacBook.
Foundry
But if it’s still under the MacBook umbrella, it’ll probably still work on macOS. Over the past four decades, Apple has refined its desktop operating system to work with a cursor, so the interface is expected to change quite a bit. The basis of macOS is a GUI with a persistent pointing device, and our fingers aren’t small enough to simply take its place. Interface elements should be larger, menus should be simplified, and multitasking should evolve.
But above all, we would need to change the way we use our Macs. When you buy a new MacBook, it’s instantly familiar to you. Even if you’ve never used a laptop, macOS makes it easy to figure out how to get started and start working. A hybrid interface on top of the existing interface would complicate everything or add an unnecessary layer that wouldn’t add much to the experience. And a new interface would make this touchscreen MacBook something completely different.
So what is it?
I’m convinced that the rumor that Apple is working on a touchscreen Mac is correct. With the M1 chip, Apple has the opportunity to take the Mac in bold new directions, which is probably why the company has chosen now to start exploring a touchscreen laptop. But I also think Apple will quickly realize that this is not the way to go for the Mac.
The Mac has shown it can exist in this post-PC world, so much so that Apple would launch a new 15-inch MacBook Air when it already has 13-inch, 14-inch, and 16-inch laptops in its portfolio. catalog. People have a lot of problems with the Mac and macOS Ventura, but none of them is that it needs a touch interface. The Mac works and there’s no reason to turn it into something it isn’t.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not opposed to the idea of a hybrid device that merges the iPad with a MacBook. Apple has a lot of overlapping pieces – the Magic Keyboard, Stage Manager, and the ability to use iPhone and iPad apps on Mac with Apple Silicon – that are more practical than revolutionary, and they need something to bring them together . It could be an iPad that has a desktop interface or a folding screen that runs a brand new operating system. But Steve Jobs was right. The solution is not a touchscreen Mac.
