Apple is set to introduce touch-screen Mac laptops, a move that will bring significant updates to macOS, including the integration of the iPhone’s Dynamic Island feature, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg News, citing people with knowledge of the plans.
The first touch-enabled Macs, expected to launch this fall, will feature the Dynamic Island centered at the top of the display, the people said, requesting anonymity because the information is not yet public.
Apple is updating its 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models to support touch input, equipping them with the same OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display technology currently used in iPhones.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Apple is announcing new products, including Mac updates, during the first week of March, but the touch-screen MacBook Pros won’t be part of that rollout. Those models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release closer to the end of 2026.
Even with the new display, Apple won’t position the MacBook Pro as an iPad replacement — or describe its interface as a touch-first experience. Instead, the idea is to let customers use the touch input as much or as little as they’d like,
To that end, the new MacBook Pro looks similar to the current model, including a full keyboard and large trackpad. Still, the Mac will gain a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input, said the people.
The display on the MacBook Pro will have the same standard touch features as the iPhone and iPad, including fast scrolling and the ability to zoom in and out of images and PDFs.
The touch-screen launch is a major shift for Apple, which for decades had criticized the idea of touch laptops. Co-founder Steve Jobs famously called such an experience “ergonomically terrible.”
MacDailyNews Take: Since we’re perfectly fine with using mice and trackpads, we’ll continue to keep our Mac displays free of greasy fingerprints, even if Apple releases touchscreen Macs.
Do you really want to smear your fingers all over your MacBook Pro’s display?
Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. – Steve Jobs
For many years, every MacBook Pro has offered a built-in multi-touch-capable Force Touch trackpad.
Does it make more sense to be smearing your fingers around on your notebook’s screen or on a spacious trackpad that’s designed specifically and solely to be touched? … The iPhone’s screen has to be touched; that’s all it has available. A MacBook’s screen does not have to be touched in order to offer Multi-Touch. — MacDailyNews, March 26, 2009
I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, remarking on the idea of a converged Mac and iPad, April 25, 2012
We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do. I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there? — Apple SVP Craig Federighi, June 5, 2018
[Y]ou get this in-between thing, and in-between things are never as good as the individual things themselves. We believe the best personal computer is a Mac, and we want to keep going down that path. And we think the best tablet computing device is an iPad, and we’ll go down that path.
iPad benefits because we assume that you need to be able to do most everything with touch, and we don’t have to trade off on that experience. Mac assumes you want to do most everything with a keyboard and mouse input. We don’t have to trade off on that path. You can look at some of the other products that will try to go halfway between the two. They end up just compromising experiences. That’s not good. – Apple SVP Phil Schiller, November 13, 2019
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People converting from PCs to the Mac will probably have warm fuzzies about this feature. I will continue to use the excellent track pad.
With all due respect to Steve, he never used an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard. You treat it like a laptop but you have the option of cradling the iPad and navigating with your fingers while resting your arms on a desk or arms rests of a chair. Its the best of both worlds, a touch interface but with a keyboard when you need it. The new MacBooks will be keyboard/trackpad first but with touch when you need it. A big step towards the Mac/iPad hybrid they’re undoubtedly experimenting with in Cupertino.
” A big step towards the Mac/iPad hybrid they’re undoubtedly experimenting with in Cupertino.”
That’s the thing – this was NEVER the dream. They are used in completely different scenarios, thus have very different UIs.
Ew gross.
:/
On a high end MacBook Pro a touch screen is something that many users may think they want, but like the original IBM Thinkpad IsoPoint that has been around for many years (that red button in the middle of the keyboard) most people rarely will use it. (You might be shocked how many people use laptops today with that IsoPoint integrated into them and have absolutely no idea what it is or have ever used it. I’ve actually walked up to those people and asked.)
Having a touch screen seems to harken back to the 80s and early 90s when trade rags used to have comparisons of features in columns after columns with checkmarks for various obscure features. Computer vendors were then building items to get as many checkmarks in those columns as possible. Some people might buy a MacBook Pro based upon having checked that spot in the column, but I truly believe the enthusiasm for its use will rapidly fade.
Personally, I’m more of a keyboard and mouse fan. I keep a travel mouse in my travel pack for my 16″ MacBook Pro (M4 Max). Track pads are OK, and the MacBook Pro’s track pad is better than any Windows based machine I have ever used. But, it’s keyboard and mouse for me for > 99% of my usage.
But a touch screen? No thanks. Keyboard, mouse, and track pad (in that order of most to least used) are a great combination for me.
I don’t have to clean my MacBook Pro’s screen often, and I don’t want to have to clean it on a nearly daily basis.
I predict the introduction of a touch-screen Mac will be an excuse to make the interface more difficult to use (dumbed down like iOS). That is, after all, the defining feature of iPadOS for me and my fat, imprecise fingertips. I’ll take a mouse or trackpad over a touchscreen any day. And Apple needs to work on lots of bug fixes before they start changing the physical way things work on the Mac.
This ain’t “Think Different,” it’s “Think Dumb,” Apple’s latest oxymoronic catch phrase.
MDN is right. This is not vision, it’s reaction + stabs in the dark.
I would love to be wrong, but I expect this week’s news to be more “meh” than “wow.”
Zzzzz