I'm afraid you may be in for disappointment, at least in the single core arena. Apple has a little headroom in clock speed and TDP, but just like the iPhone, I think large year on year improvements are going to be rare for Apple Silicon in the future. Except when they add more cores.
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Apple Execs Talk M1 Chip, Touchscreen Macs and More in New Interview
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They might sell intel machines up to a year max but I doubt that. I think Apple expects all developers already optimized their software by that time, if they want to be on the mac platform.
You should definitely get M1. It will outperform the intel one.
No, they're made in a similar style to iOS to have style overlap, they're not touch friendly - all the interactive elements are too small for touch.
The control panel, like widgets will rarely be used in macOS, good luck using touch to control Finder, Terminal, Logic, Final Cut, etc.
Man, you're determined to be stubborn, huh? You wouldn't have to use touch exclusively, you'd still have all the other inputs available. It would just be an extra option for all the uses that it makes sense for. I can't believe how much you're struggling to grasp that.
I use my 12.9” iPad Pro (Magic Keyboard) and 16” MBP interchangeably. Sometimes I need the power of a real app with file system, thus the latter machine. I’ve caught myself tapping my Macbook several times each week. It just feels natural for certain interactions.
Apple is being stubborn by giving people a useless touchbar you keep accidentally hitting when typing and yet refraining from offering (an optional) touchscreen. Same crap they did by forcing people for years onto butterfly keyboards no one wanted and that cost Apple dearly in returns and repairs.
Apple is being stubborn by giving people a useless touchbar you keep accidentally hitting when typing and yet refraining from offering (an optional) touchscreen. Same crap they did by forcing people for years onto butterfly keyboards no one wanted and that cost Apple dearly in returns and repairs.
Exactly my point too. It would be hilarious to see Apple corner themselves like they did with iPhone X onwards naming
Spotlight existed three years before iOS. And I could be wrong, but I think icons and first-party apps have been around for decades.
I meant in comparison with Intel. A-series chips have notable, consistent year-on-year gains. Intel has barely noticeable gains, and a very inconsistent schedule.
I think he meant that macOS and iOS/iPadOS now share the same Spotlight UI (at least for iPadOS), the SF Symbols icon set, and, with Catalyst, the same app code for some first-party apps.
Either way, Intel appears to have stagnated in this area as well, so it's not as though Apple will have much competition in this area.
I don't think Apple would feel too bad about that. Either way, they could still offer it as an option, be it as a specific touch screen models similar like what they did with the TouchBar, or as a CTO upgrade. On Lenovo Thinkpads it adds some $60 to $100.
It is not clear if Tim Cook knows how to implement in a way that makes touch screen become part of macOS experience.
There are many reasons to integrate a touch sensor for the MacBook display and I can assure you that it won't be happening anytime soon since Tim Cook is not the ideal person which made a lot of mistake with the redesigned model of MacBook Pro in 2016.
Addition: I’ve had this thought for 10 years. A dual-boot touchscreen MacBook with separable screen that permits keyboard/mouse-only input for OS X mode and the typical iPad experience would be the only acceptable touch-screen MacBook. Please do not compromise the laptop/desktop experience with touchability, which generally decreases the density of information/tools that can be presented on a given screen. Look at how clumsy and inefficient the Windows 10 interface can be at times, as an example. Peanut butter and chocolate is one thing, but there’s no need to try to force-combine everything. If touch is needed, the touch bar is a step in the right direction, and, if you really think about it, the trackpad already brings touch-ability to any given OS X screen.
I'm sure it's useful for certain things (and things like sliding volume/brightness also works) but the whole idea of having a keyboard that you have to look at when you are using makes very little sense to me in general.
I even remember when they initially demoed it how weird it was seeing them looking down at their fingers to hit the right place on the Touch Bar and then looking up on the screen to see what had happened.
The lack of tactile feedback, that you so easily can hit it by mistake when using the keys right below it and that you have to look at it to use it (since it changes depending on what scenario you use it) doesn't outweigh the few advantages it might have IMO.
One trick that could help there: to settings and enlarge your mouse pointer size!
Simple phrase explains why they deny it: The Osborne Effect!
Besides which, there are many cases in Apple's history where they denied they were doing X or Y or cast aspersions on A and B and then went ahead and did X, Y, A, and B!
Yep. They have a long history of “we won’t do X because of these reasons” and then they turn around and do X.
I won’t be surprised if the 2021 redesign of the MBPs includes touchscreens. But I also think they might go the other way and put MacOS on an iPad.
The problem is you're arguing with somebody who either works for Apple or pretends he does. Expecting admission of a mistake is a waste of time.
I don't care either way about Touch Bar or function keys when running as a Mac, but for work there're 2 apps I need to verify on Windows and I need function keys functioning.
I wouldn't take lack of Touch Bar as a downgrade but rather as an upgrade. I would pay $100 extra just to have functioning function keys.
Then again, I also have 2 mission critical 32-bit Mac apps so I stay on Mojave. No Catalina, no Big Sur.
I think they are getting to the point where logic/physical/circuit design improvements won’t be able to give them more than a few percent per generation, but they still have advantages over Intel, unless Intel moves to a fabless model. TSMC has managed to keep their roadmap, so Apple will benefit from an annual improvement in fab technology. (Of course AMD also gets that benefit).
And there is still a LOT apple can do with respect to IPC, whereas x86 has pretty much done what can be done.
And, of course, Apple is free to add instructions, units, etc. for its own purposes, which also allows it to improve performance year-over-year in a way that’s much harder for Intel or AMD to do, since those companies don’t also control the OS.
"We're brilliant marketers that way," said Joswiak.
I'm really hoping that it shows Joswiak give a little wink and smile when saying that in the original interview... I mean these are smart people that had to have been tongue in cheek.
I'm really hoping that it shows Joswiak give a little wink and smile when saying that in the original interview... I mean these are smart people that had to have been tongue in cheek.
I don't think anything has been confirmed one way or the other. If you read the original interview, you'll see that they choose their words very carefully. They could have made an explicit statement but chose not to. That doesn't necessarily mean they will bring out touchscreen Macs, but they are definitely leaving themselves room to do so in the future.
The downsides of bringing touch to current macOS devices have been well documented and I agree with most of them. Many people think of it as an all-or-nothing approach and can't imagine adding touch to every single current Mac.
But there's a third option. As the lines blur between iOS/iPadOS and macOS (iOS apps running natively on macOS), one could imagine interesting hybrid devices that could run iPadOS apps natively with touch input and still have macOS available (paired with a bluetooth keyboard and trackpad, for example) for certain applications which run best on macOS.
Most everyone on these forums have a smart phone and a Mac (or other PC). Some people have a desktop in addition to a laptop. Many people also use a tablet as a third device. Imagine if they created a fourth category of devices which further blurred the line between tablets and laptops? Or blurred the line between a desktop and mobile device?
These types of hybrid devices haven't been enormously popular in the Windows world but they have existed for a while and have their fans. I could see Apple really nailing a hybrid device and almost single-handedly popularizing a new category of products, and bringing touch to macOS could be an important part of that.
"We had designed and evolved the look for macOS in a way that felt most comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch."
"We're living with iPads, we're living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic – the sort of openness and airiness of the interface – the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch"
Seems pretty clear to me. Combine that with the big fat NO from Craig tells me touch is fairly unlikely coming.
