Apple: How could we boost declining MacBook sales? Oh, yea. Let's market touch screen laptops; a concept that we rejected years ago.
Despite years of resistance, Apple is now working on adding touchscreens to Macs, according to a report today from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The report claims that a new MacBook Pro with an OLED display could be the first touchscreen Mac in 2025.
Gurman said Apple engineers are "actively engaged in the project," indicating that the company is "seriously considering" producing touchscreen Macs. The first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen would retain a traditional laptop design with a trackpad and a keyboard, but the display would gain support for touch input like an iPhone or iPad.
The first touchscreen Macs are likely to use macOS, as Apple is not actively working to combine iPadOS and macOS, according to the report. iPhone and iPad apps are available on Macs with Apple silicon chips, though, unless a developer opts out.
Apple has repeatedly dismissed the idea of a touchscreen Mac over the years, so this would be a major reversal in philosophy for the company if it moves forward with these plans. In 2010, for example, Steve Jobs said that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" due to arm fatigue associated with holding up a finger to the screen. And in 2021, Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus said the Mac was "totally optimized for indirect input" and said the company did not feel there was a good reason to change that at the time.
Article Link: Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Including MacBook Pro
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Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Including MacBook Pro
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There are a few reasons to complain. It's going to be an added expense, it's going to make display repairs more expensive, it's another thing to break, it's going to consume power, and it will affect the operating system even for those who choose not to use it. We've already seen the gigantification of macOS, likely in preparation for this. They've been easing us into it.
Yet people don’t complain as much of smudges on tablets and phones; odd.
No thanks to touch screen and no thanks to the earlier report on oled.
I will be speccing out my M2 Pro or Max up soon and keeping it for a few years at least, or at least try to.
I don't want to be cleaning my screen every day or worrying about how bright I have my oled screen.
I will be speccing out my M2 Pro or Max up soon and keeping it for a few years at least, or at least try to.
I don't want to be cleaning my screen every day or worrying about how bright I have my oled screen.
Holy ****, do I not want a touch screen laptop. Strictly from an ergonomic sense, such a change would confound me. And of course fingerprints, constantly having to reset the viewing angle, the awful tradeoffs required by a "Lenovo Yoga" style hinge.
However: we've got a generation of computing users who grew up on tablets, phones, Nintendo handhelds and godawful Chromebooks, all of which are multi-touch. Maybe the very concept of an untouchable screen is foreign to these users. Maybe touchscreens are required for these users to even understand how to use a laptop in 2023.
However: we've got a generation of computing users who grew up on tablets, phones, Nintendo handhelds and godawful Chromebooks, all of which are multi-touch. Maybe the very concept of an untouchable screen is foreign to these users. Maybe touchscreens are required for these users to even understand how to use a laptop in 2023.
Careful, you’re applying logic and sense to a crowd that’s overwhelmingly predisposed to prefer their opinion as global fact.
So many of the responses in this thread make me fear the worst if any of these posters ever manage to get out of their parents’ basement and have to contribute to society.
They already have a detachable laptop display, it's called the iPad....
UI changes. Why do you think Windows 8 happened and was hated? Windows 8 is a far better UI than Windows 11 is for touch. But they want a UI to fit both needs.
Hopefully this is about macOS running on iPad (optional) rather than a touch screen Mac.
Technically it will increase laptop sales. People have grown comfortable to flick through pictures and library’s there is something natural about touch compared to using a keyboard, trackpad or mouse to perform the same action.
I don't think that the OS would need a full top to bottom redesign to allow touch. Touch would not be the primary interaction mode. Most of us use multiple interaction modes now with keyboard and mouse or trackpad. When the mouse came along, we didn't stop using the keyboard and only use the mouse. It expanded our options for how to interact with the device. When I have used a touchscreen laptop, some things made sense with a touchpad, somethings with touch, and many things with they keyboard. I would dynamically switch modes to fit the action and interface. Touch is good for tapping buttons, scrolling and pushing things around. Any of you who have used an iPad with a touchpad or mouse and keyboard will understand that you can switch between the three at any time.
With pro apps slowly being introduced on iPad Pro, it seems a merger of iPadOS and macOS is inevitable.
My windows laptop for work has a touch screen. I seldom use it. I do “normal” office tasks in the laptop: mails, excel, word, ppt, etc. no graphic design. For my the touch screen feature is nice to have but mostly not used.
This is exactly what is happening. Apple currently must realise that developing two separate mouse driven OS experiences (iOS on iPad when connected to a keyboard/mouse and macOS) is a waste of development time and they'd be much better unified. Yes they've brought them closer than ever with Catalyst apps but they are still fundamentally separate OSs.
Add to that the need to develop a new experience for VR and you start to see where this is going. We can't be far off Apple combining iOS and Mac into one unified OS that scales across all products and all experiences (touch, mouse, VR). And of course this will then enable touch on the Mac. Touch won't be the primary input method on Mac of course it will be very similar to what we have now but you will be able to scroll webpages, quickly launch an app from the dock etc using touch and it will be useful to have.
It does make zero sense, but at this point I wouldn’t put it past Apple to go that route anyway, because it’ll look good in marketing material and more common code makes maintenance cheaper, usability dissonance be damned.
No that uses a keyboard accessory with trackpad and case. Not the same thing. A laptop with a detachable display means the display/tablet is an accessory as is the base/dock. Detach display becomes a tablet canvas, attach to base/dock makes it a more powerful computer. Remember ”what is a computer?”
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Petty insults offer even less value than people stating opinions on how they feel about a rumor. There are legitimate reasons to not want this, as have been stated elsewhere in the thread. Nobody thinks 'this is a bad idea' is a fact. It's a legitimate opinion, as everybody is entitled to have, just as much as you're entitled to the opinion that people have nothing to contribute to society after reading one post from them on an internet forum.
The world would be a very dull place if everybody agreed on everything all the time.
No, just like Mac and MacBook are still different products. Merely the OS might become basically the same (a convergence of iPadOS and macOS).
Oh you know it's the routine "I don't (think I) want this therefore nobody else should get it"