Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Including MacBook Pro | Hacker News Reader

Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Including MacBook Pro

macrumors.com

26 pointsmfiguiere26 comments

Steve Jobs, 2010:

"We've done tons of user testing on this, and 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, hence pads.

For a notebook, that's why we're perfected our multitouch trackpads over the years, because that's the best way we've found to get multitouch into a notebook.

We've also, in essence, put a trackpad -- a multitouch track pad on the mouse with our magic mouse. And we've recently come out with a pure play trackpad as well for our desktop users.

So this is how were going to use multitouch on our Mac products because this (he points at someone touch laptop screen) doesn't work."

https://archive.is/bHv34

I’d love to see their data on how often iPads are used horizontally vs vertical or somewhere in between.

I think there are lots of ways to hold an iPad or laptop where your hand rests near the screen, at least for scrolling.

I think Jobs was right about touchscreens not wanting to be vertical.

However, I've wanted a drafting-table/adjustable orientation Mac/iMac/iPad, maybe something like the old Microsoft Surface Studio, for a while.

Touchscreen on a laptop is probably used more often than LIDAR on an iPhone.

LIDAR is used every time you take a photo with an iPhone in low light.

Screen size is the larger issue. Operating an iPhone vertically isn't onerous. Significant wrist fatigue on a large screen occurs regardless of tilt.

"Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" is most likely SJ bending the truth a little. What Apple's user testing certainly showed them as the 'high order bit' was "Touch surfaces don't want to be big."

SJ wouldn't be eager to mention size because critics and reviewers could have quoted him when discussing iPad.

Whenever I get off of my iPad, I find myself trying to touch my Mac’s screen. I used to own a SurfaceBook and for the longest time I had muscle memory to just touch the screen.

I agree with Steve Jobs that your arm gets tired if you’re using it to just scroll webpages. But if you have the odd thing on the side on the screen that you can just hit with your thumb, touch screens are perfect.

Do I think this is where Apple should focus its time? Probably not. My iPad has a Magic Keyboard which I use all of the time. It’s perfect having a touchscreen. It’s small and has apps made specifically for touchscreen. Adding a touchscreen to the Mac feels like busy work for employees or the company doesn’t know what to spend money on. Which is unfortunate, because there are many things that Apple could be spending money on that are much more worth their time.

I've never found touchscreens on laptops useful. In fact, I find them a bit annoying because sometimes you touch the screen when moving around.

I really don't see the benefit of them unless it's one of those laptops that you can turn into tablets. But then, imo, the ideal form factor would be closer to 12 inches. Not 13 or 14.

Honestly the main use I find for touchscreen laptops is that they're easier to clean/I don't have to baby them _quite_ as much. Actually using the touchscreen as intended? Don't do it very often at all.

Really hope they keep a non touchscreen model for the macbook pros unless they can pull it off without compromising anything. I really don't understand the appeal of touchscreen laptops.

They're good for running iPad apps.

Good point. I've only had to run an iPad app on my mac once and it worked fine with normal input but I'm sure there are at least some people that depend on or could get good use out of better interop.

Apple has been converting the UI of the Mac into something like that of iOS devices. Vertical alert windows and fake camera cutouts on the top of the screen are obvious examples. There is no purpose for that other than to accommodate the eventual merging of iOS and macOS. Long ago now, Apple absorbed Apple's macOS developer team into the iOS team. As a independent Mac developer it has been clear to me that macOS development is falling well behind iOS development. I don't think it's going to be a matter of adding a touch screen. After it happens, I don't think there will be much left the the Macintosh.

One thing you have to give apple credit for is (usually) not jumping on the bandwagon until they have a compelling solution. Pre-release, the iPad was rumored to be a netbook during that craze but netbooks died and the iPad is still here. I'm curious to see if/how they improve beyond just adding a touchscreen to the macbook.

During the height of the touchscreen ultrabook craze I had a "touchscreen MacBook" by setting up my Zenbook as a Hackintosh.

It honestly wasn't that useful past being a party trick: it's not very ergonomic to touch a laptop screen unless it folds completely like a convertible laptop. A convertible MacBook could be interesting, but that's already the niche the iPad Pro seems to try to fill despite its OS hangups.

And like the article mentions the OS X UI is not at all designed for touch input, touch targets are tiny, lots of precise movements to navigate menus, etc.

Netbooks turned into chromebooks/ultrabooks though. Back then laptops were fat and heavy so in a way the entire market had to shift to make netbooks irrelevant.

iPad with an attachable keyboard is pretty close to a netbook to be fair (Microsoft even shipped a crippled version of Windows specifically for netbooks, of course it was still way less "crippled" than iOS/iPad OS is compared to macOS. Maybe Apple will fix that with touchscreen support on Mac and finally bring then closer to iPads, since that seems to be what everyone wants)

I used to be against touchscreen Macs but after they implemented Universal Control I find myself mindlessly touching my screen to quickly close applications, muting the mic on Teams, etc.

I guess this will do well for people who use iPad as their second monitor?

meh - I don't see this as useful unless they are introducing folding like the Yoga, because you're essentially telling the computer you want to change the way you interact with it, and really I only see this being useful when I have a pen. It's like the one thing I miss when I'm lugging around my laptop - taking scribble notes with easy diagramming.

But I only say this because I need to access corporate data when I'm in meetings and my company only issues me a laptop (because I'm a dev) and not an iPad. And I'm not bringing my own tech to work.

Out on a limb prediction: Apple will introduce touchscreens to Macs and then remove them a couple of generations later.

...a decade after everyone else already did it. And their implementation will be $600 extra than anyone else, and will have a class-action lawsuit on the hardware quality before the revised model is released 4 years later at extra cost.

It's funny you say that, like non-Apple products are so much better.

We ordered a fleet of Acer laptops years ago where I used to work, where after a few weeks of use if you unscrewed the bottom cover of the laptop and shook it, screws would just fall out.

We also had an entire fleet of HP laptops have their hinge plastics snap, due to poor design where the interconnection point of the two plastics would touch the case when closing the screen.

This wasn't one the odd laptop, it was 100's of an entire fleet.

I've owned two Macbooks in my life, one from 2008 that I broke spilling liquid all over it and the other that I have had since 2013. These machines are considerably higher quality than many other laptops.

Except for 2016-2019. Those have issues with keyboards, trackpads, and power management. if you deploy them in large enough numbers, you’ll have a not so subtle percentage encounter these issues.

I agree, I also think the reason you see every single pain point of the Macbooks is because they're so much more abundant than non-Apple laptops (perhaps aside from ThinkPads).

If you looked at the last 8 years of Acer laptops, you would see a large variety of designs, of which each iteration may have had its own flaws.

My brother in christ you are buying consumer garbage Acers and HPs for a professional fleet.

"Adding a touchscreen to the Mac feels like busy work for employees or the company doesn’t know what to spend money on."

Exactly like the Touch Bar. Terrible idea.

I like using the Touch Bar but don't like touchscreen computers though.

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