Touchscreen Macs: The idea that will not die

Apple has rejected the idea of making touchscreen Macs for well over a decade now, but a recent remark by a senior company exec did appear to at least open the door to the possibility of a change of heart.

Mac and iPad marketing VP Tom Boger recently responded to a question on the topic by initially appearing to stick to the usual line – but added “I can’t say we never change our mind” …

Rejection of touchscreen Macs by Steve Jobs

We know from 2010 remarks by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that Apple has been testing touchscreen Macs since at least 2008, and likely very much earlier.

He said then that Apple “thought about this years ago” and had done a great deal of user testing. It was these tests, he said, that led the company to reject the idea.

It turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time your arm wants to fall off.

It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal.

Apple has stuck to that line ever since

Apple has continued to stick to this line ever since. In 2020, for example, there were renewed rumors that UI changes introduced in macOS Big Sur hinted at plans for a touchscreen Mac. Craig Federighi said nope.

“I gotta tell you when we released Big Sur, and these articles started coming out saying, ‘Oh my God, look, Apple is preparing for touch’. I was thinking like, ‘Whoa, why?’

“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.

Fast-forward to this week, and Apple is still saying the same thing. Boger may have left the door slightly ajar with his final comment, but what he said before that was still clear enough:

The iPad, he said, “has always been a touch-first device” while the Mac is for “indirect manipulation”—aka using a keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad […] He remained firm: iPads are for touch, Macs are not. “MacOS is for a very different paradigm of computing,” he said. 

We’ve effectively long been able to test this

While none of us have been inside Apple’s test labs to try any of the prototypes, I have used third-party modifications to add touchscreen functionality.

One of these was for an early Macintosh, and the other for the 13-inch MacBook Air. Both took the form of a monitor surround with infrared LEDs to detect the position and movement of a finger, and then a utility to have the Mac see that as a mouse movement. My arm did indeed want to drop off in both cases.

But you don’t actually need to have had that experience to see how well (or not) a touchscreen Mac would work. If you’ve ever used an iPad with the Magic Keyboard, then you can already replicate the best possible case for a touchscreen Mac.

That’s because you have the keyboard and trackpad as primary input devices, but are also able to use the iPad’s touchscreen directly – with a touch-first UI meaning we don’t even have to get into the impact of the OS.

So … using the iPad as a pseudo-MacBook in this way, how much use do you make of the iPad touchscreen?

My answer is ‘not enough to justify it’

I won’t claim I never use the touchscreen when using my iPad in this way (though I should mostly use past tense for this).

One thing I have done from time to time is use the touchscreen for rapid scrolling. If I want to scroll normally, to the next screen, then I use the trackpad. But if I want to quickly scroll a long way down a very lengthy document, then flicking it with my finger is quicker.

(I also use touch for Split View and Slide Over – but that is entirely because the UI for each of these is horrible, and touch is the only way to overcome this, so we can ignore that when discussing a touchscreen Mac.)

And, as far as I can recall, that’s it.

So for me, there’s no way that the incredibly occasional use I make of touchscreen in MacBook-stand-in mode would justify the added cost of adding one to an actual MacBook.

Maybe making one is the only way this idea dies

I’ve said before that I have no objection to Apple including one in the line-up – just don’t make me pay for it, and don’t mess with the macOS UI to accommodate it.

By all means, offer one or more models to make happy those who want a touchscreen Mac. But don’t fit them as standard, and for the love of all that is holy, keep the iPadOS UI team far, far away from my Mac!

My very strong suspicion is that it wouldn’t sell well enough for Apple to keep it in the line-up. But hey, maybe that’s the only way to make this idea finally die: Create one, see how many are willing to pay the premium, and – crucially – see how many of them would ever buy another one once they’ve actually used it.

Photo by Microsoft Edge on Unsplash