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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

Its SO ANNOYING to have to carry an Apple Silicon macbook AND an ipad. I'd love to see a touchscreen option for macbook and the option to run in ipad mode. But that would probably cannibalize sales.

As it is, you can theoretically run ios apps on Apple Silicon, but most app vendors disable that..

My main use case for an ipad while traveling is to watch downloaded movies on a plane. "AR" (not really) glasses like nreal air are way smaller and lighter than an ipad and makes watching movies on my phone pretty amazing..

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I believe product design votes against it because it would make all macbooks always be smudged and scratched, looking shit.

Which is simply not true. Decades of touchscreen PCs show this isn't the case. My Surface Laptop 3 is 6 years old with thousands of hours of use (including constant touch and a fair amount of pen) and the screen isn't scratched and doesn't look bad at all.

I don't think this is the reason. Since Apple stopped making new interesting product lines they are very attentive about not having one line cannibalize the sales of the other(s) as it happened with the iPod and iPhone. This is also the reason why iPads will never run macOS and vice-versa.

Out of curiosity, what is it about touchscreens that's such a big selling point for you?

not the person you're responding too, but I'm writing this on an older ThinkPad L390 Yoga with touchscreen, and I gotta say, being able to scroll on the screen when reading large documents (like PDF textbooks), or to just touch the part of the screen you'd like you're cursor to be if you've got multiple windows open is really nice.

apple pencil

Wacom tablet?

As someone who uses a Wacom tablet daily, it is not convenient for traveling because you don't always find the right table to use it. I can imagine OP wants to use his tablet while sitting on his bed in his hotel room.

I have one but I stopped using it after I got an iPad. Its somuch better to see the drawing where i actually drag my pen.

Great question..

Me personally? Nothing. I hate them. I never want anybody to touch my screen.

However, I've talked to at least one team that has disabled their app on MacOS who thinks having a UI designed for touch-screen run via a trackpad is too janky and would lead to a bad UX for their customers.

I've run their app via playcover, and it IS janky, but its a lot better than the weight of an iPad in my backpack.

They're inherently convenient and fast to use. As I'm typing, it's far more ergonomic to take my middle finger and swipe on the screen to scroll than to reposition my hand to have two fingers on the trackpad. For extended reading I can keep one hand at the edge of the screen to scroll with a thumb instead of cramping my wrist. Zooming is quickly and intuitively obvious rather than having to figure out where my mouse cursor is, reposition it, do a pinch gesture or Ctrl plus (where IS the plus key? It seems to vary on every laptop I own), etc.

The hand repositioning was the rationale for the ThinkPad TrackPoint (which I still use daily). Right on the home row, and with 3 buttons for left/right/scroll+zoom purposes. Sadly it never caught on, possibly because the precision is not as good as a touchpad. It's even been removed from some of the latest ThinkPads.

If only the macbook opened more than the 120 degrees (or so) angle with the screen I'd be sooo happy already (no touch required).

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