If you ’re reading this article on a MacBook , turn over out and touch your covert for a moment . Tap around on some tabs , or pretend like you ’re select text or zooming into a photo .
How did it palpate ? Not great , right ? The screen move , it was n’t visceral or efficient , and everything was better when your hand rifle back to repose on the keyboard . There ’s a reason why the laptop design has n’t really change much over the past 20 years . It ’s perfect for what it does .
And the MacBook is the pinnacle of that paragon . Whether you ’re using a MacBook Air or a 16 - column inch MacBook Pro , the excogitation , word form factor , and build quality are brilliant , it ’s unbelievably comfortable , and the Force Touch trackpad is superb . Now that the butterfly incubus is over , the keyboard is fantastic and well-off , and even the 16 - inch model is unaccented enough to convey anywhere .
While there ’s certainly room for betterment — a good webcam , Face ID , 5 G musical accompaniment , and of course longer battery life — the latest rumour thatApple is working on adding a touchscreento the MacBook does n’t excite me . Quite the opponent , in fact : I recall it would make the MacBook worse .
Look but don’t touch
If you bet at the most successful touchscreen PCs , they have one matter in plebeian : they exchange into tablets . Tapping at a display that has a flexible joint does n’t make for a good experience . It ’s why Apple ’s Magic Keyboard has a “ blow cantilever design ” and Microsoft ’s Surface has a kickstand . merely popping a touch - sensible showing on a MacBook Air is n’t going to get it done .
I ’m pretty confident in saying that Apple is n’t going to add a kickstand to the MacBook . So that leaves two options for turn an existent MacBook into a touchscreen twist : build a hinge hard enough to hold out taps and pinches without moving , or make a MacBook screen that can flip 180 degree or fold out like theSurface Laptop Studio . Either move would unconditionally change what the MacBook is , likely append a duet of hundred dollar bill to the price , and fundamentally produce a whole young course of machine that might not be better than what we have now .
Apple could do something similar to the Surface Laptop Studio with a touchscreen MacBook .
Foundry
But if it ’s still under the MacBook umbrella , it would presumptively still break away macOS . Over the past four decades , Apple has refined its screen background operating system to puzzle out with a cursor , so the interface would need to change in a not - peanut way . The basis of macOS is a GUI with a haunting pointing gadget , and our fingerbreadth are n’t lowly enough to simply take its place . Interface elements would need to be larger , menus would need to simplify , and multitasking would necessitate to evolve .
But above all , we ’d need to vary how we utilize our Macs . When you buy a new MacBook , it ’s outright intimate . Even if you ’ve never used a laptop , macOS make it easy to figure out how to stand out in and take off working . A intercrossed port on top of the existing one would either complicate the whole thing or add an unnecessary layer that tot little to the experience . And a raw port would make this touchscreen MacBook something altogether different .
So what is it?
I have little dubiousness that the rumor that Apple is working on a touchscreen Mac is correct . With the M1 scrap , Apple has an opportunity to take the Mac in sheer new focusing , which is likely why the company chose now to bug out exploring a touchscreen laptop . But I also retrieve Apple will rapidly realise that it ’s not the way forward for the Mac .
The Mac has establish that it can subsist in this post - PC world , so much so that Apple is rumour to be put out anew 15 - column inch MacBook Airdespite already having a 13 - inch , 14 - inch , and 16 - inch laptop computer in its catalog . citizenry have plenty of issue with the Mac and macOS Ventura , but none of them are that it needs a touch interface . The Mac works and there ’s no reason to change it into something it ’s not .
Do n’t get me wrong : I ’m not fight back to the idea of a hybrid gimmick that merges the iPad with a MacBook . Apple has lots of overlap piece – the Magic Keyboard , Stage Manager , and the ability to use iPhone and iPad apps on Mac with Apple silicon – that are more commodious than groundbreaking ceremony , and they ask something to bring them all together . Maybe it ’s an iPad that has a desktop interface or a close down screen that hunt a brand - new OS . But Steve Jobs was right . The solution is n’t a touchscreen Mac .
