Big Sur's new UI shouts touch screen......

[vigyan]

Its just a speculation. Its not something I am hoping for. I love using my trackpad. The new UI really looks like calling for touchscreen Macs. I wouldn't be surprised to see coming this fall. Whether they will be Intel based or Apple silicon. Who knows? Though the later seems more probable. Look at these iPad like buttons and sliders. I don't see a lot of difference in using them with mouse or trackpad but with your fingers it definitely makes sense. With all new widgets (RIP Dashboard, Long live widgets.....lol) once again. From the brief last night everything to my eyes or should I say fingers made me want to touch and operate these colourful and fun looking widgets & buttons. The Dock below looks big enough for fingers, at least I never keep mine so big. That could change. Well call this daydreaming or just a tech hunch or simply wild speculation.

Still what do you think?

 

[Falhófnir]

Control centre looks very touchscreeny - but is that just for visual harmony with iOS? Other things still don’t look like they’d work very well (though I guess easily enough changed) like the window control circles, and despite having ‘more breathing room’ the menu bar still looks like it would be a little bit fiddly to operate by touch.

Having said this, I’ve always thought touchscreen on a laptop is more of a secondary input, you still mostly use mouse and keyboard, but it allows you to interact with your content in another way when you want to. Because of that I guess not everything absolutely has to be touch optimised for a touchscreen Mac? Apple Pencil support alone would probably be enough reason to bring it to Mac (alongside a fold-flat design, or surface studio style iMac).

 

[vigyan]

you are right, it could pave way for pencil support too, though a little cumbersome unless the screen can be flat. they have drastically changed menu bar and how the expanding elements look and bigger buttons there too.

 

[shapesinaframe]

Making the menus match iOS/iPadOS makes sense given the new virtualisation features, makes the UI consistent regardless of what the kind of app it is - but yeah, totally looks like its heading in the direction of touch UI.

I'm hoping iOS homescreen widgets make their way to the macOS desktop in the future.
I miss Dashboard