alt Hacker NewsTouch-screen Macs is kind of a terrible development for anyone who loves the Mac. It's not just a harmless feature that you can ignore if you don't want it, because it's customer-facing and will now generate complaints and bugs from people who do use it. Those people will complain (rightly) that macOS UI widgets are too small to accurately manipulate with your fingers (they are indeed too small) and don't make sense with a touch screen (they don't make sense).
That means Apple will begin imposing all sorts of UI dreck on all of us, whether we want to use our screens as touch surfaces or not.
This is basically what happened with Microsoft - Windows Vista and 7 were installed in plenty of laptops with touchscreens, and customers would complain about not being able to maximize windows without closing them, not being able to open menus without touching toolbar buttons, etc.
Eventually Microsoft listened to them and we got Windows 8. Now this is the beginning of the same process for macOS.
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I was expecting there to be more like a ‘studio mode’ where you can fold it over to make it a screen interface that has some kind of bigger iPad style Ui. Where you could also use a stylus.
Basically a product for the people currently carrying around a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro.
Just touch on a laptop screen makes no sense. I’ve never felt the need to do this.
Maybe it comes and goes like the Touch Bar (yeah I know, quite unlikely, but one can dream) ;)
Judging by the Apple marketing page, touch is used for (1) scroll; (2) zoom; (3) draw. I hope that’s all the ways touch can be used. It’s a bad idea to expect touch to be used instead of the cursor to click on buttons.
I don't think it's quite that bad, but I’m already in the habit of swatting the hands of people who point too closely at things on my laptop screen with their greasy fingers. gtfo
I've been an Apple die hard ever since the OG iMac (still love those things). Never before have I so strongly felt the pull to Linux.
100% agree We should assume that new engineering leadership that came - it was too late. Let’s pray that MacBook pro team will leave apple sooner or later to build alternative laptop. This touchscreen seems to be bifurcation point with no return. I hope we also get alternative for M-class cpu, this might be the biggest dealbreaker
My work laptop has a touch screen, I only ever remember about that when it gets too dusty and I start to wipe it.
I think this can easily be seen in the introduction of windows into iPad OS. I hate when the wrong motion creates a window from what I was working with. And this is on the 11" pro.
Hahahaha have you even used macOS starting with tahoe? the liquid glass ui was made for touch! it is literally the antithesis of mouse-driven design. the buttons are large and circular, with huge corner radii. huge gaps in between them as well.
I mean, if this is what you've been waiting for forever and it changes your life for the better, then congrats. But I think this will wind up being a huge net-negative for most Mac users as macOS is made to look and feel more and more like iPadOS.
And Mac OS is built adjacent to iOS which shares most themes and design principles. The ecosystem is already designed around touch.
Perhaps it is with a heavy dose of copium that I say: I hope the extremely tentative development and release of this product (after having been on the record as fervently against touchscreen laptops), along with the eye-watering price point indicates that this isn't being viewed as the future of the MacOS experience. I hope this remains framed as a true pro-focused experience that unlocks specific apps without greatly impacting the central MacOS design philosophy.
I agree with the doomerism, and I expect the end goal would be merging MacOS UI with iPadOS. so the Mac will be an iPad with a keyboard. Clumsy , low-resolution controls that depend on clumsy touch experiences instead of lightning fast keyboard shortcuts.
The end result will be akin to taking keyboards away from Platinum league top tier Korean pro RTS players. 500+ operations per minute down to 10
I disagree. One of the key differentiators is that technology is being introduced in the highest cost, highest capability sku in their product lineup. This laptop costs more than my first car, although I’m old :)
What Microsoft introduced touch surfaces, they came out of the train wreck of Longhorn and they were under the belief that they could push windows down to phones. Reality was that they pushed touch surfaces in a barbell distribution… ultra high end and ultra low end. Mostly low end as screen costs were super high.
With Apple, look at the pencil and the iPad. They’ve had a lot of fits and starts, but the Apple Pencil didn’t fundamentally change the iPad, but it did open the door for a very high value use cases for things like procreate.
Probably not because at the end of the day the employees and engineers at Apple have to use the Mac and macOS to write software so there's a concrete floor that they can't break through in terms of usability. They may make some mistakes or something but the OS has basically been the same thing for like 20 years. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I would argue that once the dust settled post-Windows 8 with Windows 10 a full decade ago, the touch screen has been the opposite of what you’ve described for Windows systems. It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one.
Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.