There are two types of people in this world, those who have no problem touching a computer screen,
and those who cannot tolerate it at all.
I believe that fingers should stay down on keyboards, but sometimes you don't know until you try.
For over a decade with the launch of the MacBook Air, Apple has resolutely refused to add a touchscreen to the Mac.
It's not in an optimal position, you don't feel comfortable. The best way to deliver multi-touch in the notebook
is through the track pad. But in this office, that attitude is deeply confusing
among the many Windows PC users who have touchscreens. They say a touchscreen is useful, essential even,
and that Mac users have no idea what they're missing.
Well, to find out, we're going to build a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen.
And here it is.
It can do everything your touchscreen Windows laptop can do.
You can open apps, close apps, zoom, scroll, move the text input cursor,
and even swipe between desktops. How neat.
There are drawbacks though. The laptop doesn't close anymore, eliminating some of its portability.
It's much heavier, which puts a lot of weight on the screen hinge,
so it can't hold it up at certain angles. And this cable is really annoying.
These are things that wouldn't be a problem on a proper TouchMac book.
But nevertheless, having this $300 espresso screen taped onto the computer
has fooled me into thinking it was the actual screen. Green tape, not withstanding.
After using this for a while, I have to say that I rarely reached up to use it.
And I think I know why.
The arguments for a touchscreen on a laptop seem to circle around convenience.
It's useful in specific postures, like standing, or walking, or squatting, or sitting on a couch.
These positions can naturally encourage you to hold your laptop in a way that places your fingers
closer to the screen than the trackpad, making it so much more convenient to navigate around.
Here's the deal. Apple has a device for these cases and positions,
with software explicitly designed from the ground up for touch.
The iPad, which leads me to an argument that needs to be made.
And it's one I think Apple's been trying to articulate.
The finger is a blunt instrument, fat and round.
The pointing device, a mouse or trackpad, is a precise instrument.
You can see it on the screen how the pointer tapers to a pixel-thin point.
And pixels are very small now. What works well with a mouse doesn't work well with a finger.
And what works well with a finger, obviously, it's a mouse. So if you design a device with an interface for touch,
it needs to have big, simplified UI elements, while being light and easy to hold,
like an iPad or an iPhone. That form factor is in fact limiting.
But by remaining focused, it's also liberating. Now, I am aware of the addition of mouse and trackpad support on iPadOS,
but I think people are a little confused about it, because I'm quite certain it was purely for the magic keyboard.
Apple believes reaching up from a keyboard to manipulate a screen
is so inconvenient that they were willing to make the iPad
more laptop-like just to solve it. It wasn't a convergence of these platforms.
It was a solution to an ergonomic problem brought upon by a keyboard accessory.
And look at the pointer when using that trackpad on the iPad.
It's round and blunt, like your finger, only transforming when it gets close to something it can manipulate.
It's abundantly clear that the iPad will always be a touch-first device.
And so it should remain that the Mac be a pointer-first device.
Remember Windows 8? Microsoft meekly and foolishly thought they could force the industry
towards touch with their start-screen interface. But nobody fully committed to it, not even them.
Even their touch-first, ARM-based Surface RT still had a mousey desktop mode,
quite simply because the office team didn't even bother to make a touch version of their productivity suite for it.
And that took over two years. And by that time, Microsoft returned to a mouse-centric form with Windows 10.
Oh, and did you know that Windows 10 still has a tablet mode
and that Microsoft Office has a touch mode? Bet you didn't. And I bet you'll never use them either,
because we all know how Windows works, and changing those basic concepts isn't worth the effort of learning them.
But let's imagine that Apple thought integrating touch was worth doing.
Well, you can bet that it would be done in a way that would be very exciting and worth the effort of learning.
Because let's not forget how beloved and revolutionary the experience on the iPad was.
The release of Big Sur actually got a lot of people speculating that Apple was preparing macOS for the touchscreen.
There's the additional spacing between items and menus, and the friendly touchability of the new control center.
But I think Apple would have to go further, because touch interfaces are difficult to use when your ARM is suspended in mid-air.
The dock would have to be placed on either side of the screen, so you can hold your hand on the side and stabilize it.
Yes, you can move the dock there now, but what kind of monster really does that?
And even compared to the way things are on Big Sur, I still think buttons would need to be 20 to 30 to 50% larger.
Or maybe Apple could do something really unusual, and let us swipe, pinch, and do all the multi-touch gestures on the screen, but not tap.
This would allow the OS to remain dense and the mouse remain useful,
while still offering the magical, convenient, and collaborative character of natural interfaces.
The reason I'm working so hard to imagine the possibilities of touch
is because after using this MacBook for a couple of weeks,
as well as a Dell XPS 2-in-1, I can tell you that I seldom reached up and touched the screen.
A scroll here, a tap there, maybe, that was about it.
And again, maybe that's because this OS isn't made for touch.
If it didn't take me two taps to close an app in full screen mode,
perhaps taps would be more inviting. As it is, I basically only used it when my hand was near
an already exposed button or scrolling opportunity.
But when I'm sitting at a desk writing, that rarely happens.
And when I'm sitting on a couch lamping, I'll use an iPad.
If Apple releases their next MacBook with a touchscreen option,
everything would be fine. But I still wouldn't understand it, and I definitely wouldn't select it.
It would have to be implemented like mouse support on iPad. Convenience, sure, but inessential.
To me, that convenience is not worth the fingerprints on the screen.
Thanks for touching on this Mac Address.
I've heard all the arguments for adding a touchscreen on the Mac.
Comment below what your thoughts on this whole touchscreen conversation is.
I'm curious if I really am the minority here.