Touch MacBook Pros - Check out this idea...

[groove-agent]

I'm a minimalistic person and prefer to do the most with the least amount of devices. I love my iPad, but wish I could run my regular MacOS apps on it. I love my MacBook Pro, but wish it had touch and a pencil.

I was on a Youtube spiral and came across these espresso displays (https://espres.so). They're portable USB-C powered touch displays that can connect to your MacBook Pro, Windows PC.

I'd love if Apple made something similar that was the exact size of the laptop, that was portable and had less bezels. You could have your MacBook Pro closed, and have the display MagSafe connected to the top and use your pencil. The pencil would allow you to touch the smaller MacOS objects on the screen.

I thought I could maybe use my iPad as a touch screen in this way, but as soon as you close the MacBook Pro, your screen goes away.

 

[groove-agent]

Upon more investigation, if you sidecar your iPad and keep your MacBook Pro open you can use the pencil to interact with MacOS. I was able to open Photoshop and draw with my pencil and the latency was surprisingly low. When you connect it to the MacBook Pro with a USBC cable and set the iPad as the main display you can close the MBP and just use the iPad. You can also set the the Apple Pencil to double click. If you use two fingers on the iPad you can scroll MacOS as well.

Typing on the sidecar iPad is slow like typing on an iPhone keyboard. I wonder if the magic keyboard for iPad combined with Universal Control would allow you to use the magic keyboard to control the mouse and keyboard on the iPad?

This could be my new workflow. I can't believe I didn't come across this before.