According to Mark Gurman in Bloomberg, Apple’s forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro will demonstrate that the company remains nowhere near merging the Mac and iPad lines. While a hybrid device—such as an iPad capable of running full Mac software or a MacBook with a more tablet-like interface—has clear appeal, that convergence isn’t on the horizon anytime soon, if ever. Apple’s leadership continues to firmly insist on maintaining clear separation between the iPad and Mac product categories.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
For years, Apple Inc. fans have dreamed of the company merging the iPad and Mac — a move that would combine the speed and battery life of a computer with the touch interface of a tablet.
Publicly, Apple has denied wanting to do such a thing. Behind the scenes, though, engineers have been exploring the idea. They’ve discussed all sorts of ways to bring the two systems together — from running the current version of macOS on beefier iPads to building a new type of operating system befitting a hybrid product. There’s even been talk of completely folding together the Mac and iPad app ecosystems.
But despite the appeal of a hybrid device (an iPad running Mac software or a Mac with an iPad interface), we’re not heading there anytime soon, if ever. Apple executives have remained steadfast about keeping the iPad and Mac distinct.The company argues that it produces better devices by separating the categories, but there’s also a business consideration. Internally, executives believe that a hybrid plan would hurt sales… Apple would much rather customers buy both an iPad and a Mac…
[T]he touch-based MacBook Pro will not feel like an iPad. As I wrote this past week, Apple is being very deliberate about this with the product’s development and marketing. The Mac will be a touch-friendly device, rather than one that’s touch-first…
Moreover, the MacBook Pro will continue to have its full keyboard, trackpad and current industrial design, making it far from a hybrid. This is the MacBook Pro you’ve known for the past two decades — with touch offered as a bonus. The point-and-click interface will remain at the forefront, and touch will be completely optional.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, since we’re perfectly fine with using mice and trackpads, we’ll continue to keep our Mac displays free of greasy fingerprints, even when 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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Apple already tried it in a limited way. The TouchBar (only on MacBook Pro). It eventually failed because it was not implemented consistently AND because it was not available universally on all Macs. Even for the same user of MacBook Pro, available on built-in keyboard, but if MacBook Pro used in fancy desktop setup, no USB keyboard had a TouchBar. Developers (even for Apple’s own apps) chose not to extensively support TouchBar over time. A touch screen on MacBook Pro would be like giant TouchBar, not available universally and not implemented consistently. The reason Windows got kludged-up with touch after Windows 7 was because then-CEO Ballmer got spooked by the new iPad (believing it to be the future), decided to turn Windows into a tablet OS.