Touch-screen Macs is kind of a terrible development for anyone who loves the Mac. It's not just a harmless feature that you can ignore if you don't want it, because it's customer-facing and will now generate complaints and bugs from people who do use it. Those people will complain (rightly) that macOS UI widgets are too small to accurately manipulate with your fingers (they are indeed too small) and don't make sense with a touch screen (they don't make sense).
That means Apple will begin imposing all sorts of UI dreck on all of us, whether we want to use our screens as touch surfaces or not.
This is basically what happened with Microsoft - Windows Vista and 7 were installed in plenty of laptops with touchscreens, and customers would complain about not being able to maximize windows without closing them, not being able to open menus without touching toolbar buttons, etc.
Eventually Microsoft listened to them and we got Windows 8. Now this is the beginning of the same process for macOS.
I would argue that once the dust settled post-Windows 8 with Windows 10 a full decade ago, the touch screen has been the opposite of what you’ve described for Windows systems. It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one.
Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.
I don't think you can say that. Windows 10+ has a tablet mode that is completely detached from desktop mode, and it's a global toggle. Switching on tablet mode brings full-screen, upscaled, simplified explorer and settings, and switches off the classic desktop launcher with paper bin, shortcuts, etc. in favor of a larger "Start"-type menu launcher. What deeper and experimental integration there was in Windows 8 had just been removed as it became clear MS couldn't quite sell into the iPad/Android tablet market or compete in terms of power management. After stripping most of Windows 8 innovations, what remains is a touch keyboard, touch mouse emulation, and a few affordances in explorer to make tablets not outright terrible, with the target audience education and mbas interested in mobile powerpoint and web/mail.
Windows 10 had a tablet mode. Windows 11 does not - it just appropriately scales up the padding and size of some UI controls to make them easier to tap.
The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.
Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.
> The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.
Well, a lot of devs did move back to the terminal ;)
I encourage it! I think having to deal with switching between mouse and keyboard actually accentuates why the terminal is nice as an interface so often. If it does nothing more than make someone building a terminal app think just a bit harder about where to be intentional about user workflows so that a mouse is not even required then it may even have helped keyboard-only uses.
But even an half-way experience is an improvement for a feature that costs nearly zero dollars to include.
One of the most common actions among all computer users, zooming and centering a photo, is easier with a touch screen.
Even adding just that one thing is worth having a touch screen for.
Another example: working in the iOS simulator is now way easier because you can touch your apps that you're developing for iOS and iPadOS. And, by the way, macOS can run iOS/iPadOS apps directly from the App Store, so if there's something you really want to run that you just can't find a macOS equivalent for, there you go, you can just do it and interact with the app more naturally.
The only touchscreen laptop I ever understood the appeal of was that one Lenovo one where you can fold the bottom back to make it a literal tablet or prop up as a kickstand.
The value of “tablet mode” would mainly be if I want to do content consumption, like watch video or read a book, while on the couch or in bed since it allows a wider range of postures you can sit or lay in when you don’t have to rest it on a flat surface.
If you can’t fold it back I just don’t get the appeal.
The touchscreen laptops I have seen last years are just normal windows laptops that happen to have a touchscreen, which I assume is what you refer to as "half way experience". How are you supposed to use it any differently anyway when you cannot actually turn it into a tablet anyway by separating screen and keyboard? And my impression was not that anybody was unhappy anyway.
I've never hard particularly good experiences with using Windows laptops as tablets, but mostly on account of form factor rather than software.
The sweet spot for me is the iPad mini, but I tend to use tablets as glorified e-readers and video players; the only serious work I do on them is reading.
With that said, I have zero problem with touchscreens or convertable form factors. In fact, I used a Surface Pro for years as my main laptop, and it was one of the best Windows laptops I've used.
But again, I'm not a big fan of mobile devices as primary computing devices unless I'm actually working on the go.
Even for commuting back and forth between an office and a home office, I'd rather just put something along the lines of a Mac Studio in a bag — for a few months last year, it was actually a SFF (not micro, weighed about 10 kg) Dell OptiPlex in an aluminium briefcase, which was fine!
The downgrade to touch is fine for basically everyone. People clutching pearls are simply mostly uninformed or specifically worried about deep edge cases from some stupid mountain of stupid superiority.
"Tablet mode" was not necessary to use for touchscreen, though. As far as I remember you can have full touchscreen functionality in the default mode of windows. I had a surface pro 4 for some years and I do not remember using tablet mode ever.
Windows 8, which was tablet-oriented, was one of these skip generations of windows that nobody cares about in the end, and when the next comes everybody forgets. I never installed it anyway. I have not owned a touchscreen laptop myself since then, but from friends that have and I have used theirs, it is like OP described as a "harmless additional feature/why not", something that just makes certain interactions a bit faster.
But especially on an actual laptop, one that you cannot just separate the screen from the keyboard, stuff like "virtual keyboard" and "tablet mode" matter much less because it is not like you will take it and use it as a pure tablet anyway.
I made this point below, but Windows 10 still doesn't have the display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7. Windows 10 wastes all kind of screen space on large, flat surfaces that a non-touch-screen user will never use. Windows 7 wasn't as pretty as Windows 10, but it was better at displaying information.
So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.
Windows 10/11 looks almost identical to Windows 7. I really don’t see a major difference.
But even if I accept your premise, I’ll remind you that Windows 7 came out 19 years ago. I didn’t exactly own a 27” 4K monitor in 2009, and a 14” or 16” screen laptop in 2009 would not have been thin and light like it is today. 2009 was like “my bezels are over a half inch wide” era.
The OS is fully scalable as well. You can just make it smaller in a very granular way. Windows 7 wasn’t capable of that.
UI designers think that an interface should look like an art project rather than a tool, and that discoverability and information density are bugs to be squashed.
Let's try to imagine a situation when Win10+ UI has "the same display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7".
Would it change anyhthing? No. Because developers of the programs what are not part of Windows aren't keen on keeping "the same efficiency". Audacity 4, Thunderbird are good examples of a bad interface - and they did it disregarding the OS UI.
I've been using Thunderbird since I don't even remember when and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface, unless when they broke manually sorting folders and fixed it years later. It's got the UI that a mail client has to have. GMail does have a bad UI. Sometimes I don't understand where a message ends and where a message starts. Luckily I don't have to use it.
They are basically throwing away the existing UI asking with its decades of refinement in favor of something that looks like what you'd get if apple mail and outlook had a disfugured child.
Oh the horror. However Thunderbird 115 was from 2023 (or 2024?) I am on version 159 now and I am still using the old UI. Either the new one is opt in or I opted out of it and forgot about the issue.
> and I never noticed that it's got a bad interface
That's because you are just accustomed to it [0]. If you would have a fresh look on it, especially on a small screen - it would find it atrocious.
There is still a separate SMTP configuration and it's a separate separate SMTP configuration for the each account.
There is absolutely useless left vertical bar which... does nothing what can't be shoved unto the useless, empty top bar. There is useless empty top bar which holds a search box and a hamburger menu.
For the unknown reason[1] this top bar is twice the tall of the regular menu. Oh. There is TWO search boxes[2]. Enabling Quick Filter adds another toolbar instead of using the bar where the button 'Quick Filter' resides.
And if you have multiple accounts and for some reason you can't auth for a moment (eg server problem, not with a connection) you would be spammed with the auth boxes and even if you successfully auth in one - you would still need to cancel or auth in all other what was spammed on you.
There is a lot, a lot of things where TB sucks. You just familiar with it.
[0] and probably configured it years ago and never touched the config too.
[1] actually it to be tall enough to hold hamburger button - because there is an option to add buttons to it. But you can't move buttons from the left useless vertical bar to the top bar. So you can have 'Mail', 'Calendar' etc duplicated on the top bar... for what?
NB yes you can hide the left vertical bar. Hide, not remove. Still it was thought on, implemented and shoved on our asses for absolutely no reason..
Not anymore, a lot of apps (from browsers to the system UI) adapt to whether you have a touch screen and whether you use it. For example, Windows Explorer and Edge (and Chrome) still use (relatively-)compact widgets on touchscreen-less computers.
At 100% scaling with "Compact view" on, Windows 11's File Explorer takes 135 pixels to get from the top of the titlebar to the top of the content. The same dimension in Windows 7 is 92 pixels. That's almost 50% vertical space bloat for no discernible benefit.
unless i misunderstand the implication as to their behavior on touchscreenful computers, this would seem to poorly address the concern upthread of explicitly expecting the touchscreen hardware, and thus the concomitant software annoyances, to become effectively unavoidable
Are you making this point from the context where you’ve never tried a touch screen computer?
This isn’t an unimplemented theory. You can head over to Best Buy right now and see what it’s like to use a touch screen laptop.
I feel like all this debate is taking place in an odd vacuum where a lot of us are talking about a bunch of potential problems with having a touch screen on a computer and all these problems are already resolved.
Maybe it’s similar to the whole iPhone duo thing where Apple users are just discovering all the caveats of a foldable phone, but we’ve already gone over all of it with competitors.
In general the vast majority of folks that make these comments are exactly from that viewpoint. It was a valid concern a decade ago--right now it just makes them uninformed.
> It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore. There’s no reason not to have one
what i've learning developing and creating products over the years is that harmless features tend to be the ones that cause the most problems. for ex, now you have to add touchscreen code to the OS vs previously not having it at all. and this code or feature we will support for the rest of the lifetime of that product.
You make a good point. Windows 10 course corrected fairly heavily from Windows 8. The tablet mode was there but you could ignore it pretty easily.
However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.
Aero -> Liquid Glass
Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications
Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS
Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades
Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro
I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.
The UI isn't worse though, it's literally the same. It's just an additional option you have to be able to touch the screen. I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen. I don't really care that it does because that functionality of the computer cost a single digit amount of dollars to include in the design.
I'll list out two immediate benefits with zero UI changes that macOS touch screen users will get:
iOS developers will be able to touch their apps in the simulator.
Pinch/zoom/centering photos will be highly intuitive for basically everyone because basically everyone has family photos and a photo library.
There's nothing expensive about touch screens. They are nearly free to include in a bulk custom laptop panel design.
Go over to the Lenovo/Dell/HP website and you'll see that they offer a touch screen option for something like $50 and you can just choose whether you have it or not.
Go buy a $450 iPad from Apple and it has a touch screen. That's cheaper than any Mac on sale.
Hey, that's another great point, maybe Apple's laptops could be more customizable and modular, wouldn't that be nice?
I was expecting there to be more like a ‘studio mode’ where you can fold it over to make it a screen interface that has some kind of bigger iPad style Ui. Where you could also use a stylus.
Basically a product for the people currently carrying around a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro.
Just touch on a laptop screen makes no sense. I’ve never felt the need to do this.
The touch screen mac and iphone duo feel like ideas Apple has rejected for so long because they suck, but consumers keep asking for it. Seems they finally relented and released them, and people can learn it's simply bad.
Foldable phones are a growing segment of the mobile phone industry. The newest iterations of foldables work quite well and I'm quite happy with mine, and I have no desire to go back to a candy bar phone after having one.
I think touch screen Mac is mostly pointless though.
If you can special plead away the unavoidable materials science and engineering downsides there’s lots of ideas that can sound great. Alas that’s not the world we live in.
I have a MBP M1 which has been my main laptop since it came out. I never really understood why so many people complained about the Touch Bar. In fact, I will kind of miss the Touch Bar when I eventually replace the MBP M1 with something else a few more years down the line.
It not only removed the F-keys, but it was not as responsive as a keyboard and a misplaced finger did something you may not want. Personally I HATED the thing.
On my MBP M1, the Esc key is physical one sitting in the same place as normal; top left. On the top right is the power / Touch ID button. And filling the space between them is the Touch Bar.
And I think the reason I like the Touch Bar is because being able to slide the screen brightness and the speaker volume up and down on it is both pretty quick and precise. Much more comfortable than only having volume up / down and screen brightness up / down buttons. And I can’t really think of anything that I am missing physical Fn buttons for in anything of what I am doing on the machine. Even booting into recovery mode does not involve use of any Fn keys. Just press and hold the power button when powering the machine on and keep holding it pressed until it goes to startup options.
Adjust brightness/sound: I can do that very easy and precisely without a touch bar. There's a button in the top right corner that has a slider. Both take about the same amount of time/movement to do.
My main gripe is that some of the buttons move around depending on which app you have focused.
Exactly! To this day i’m not sure why we can’t have both, would be a nice addon option. Telegram emotes and stickers show up beautifully there. I love having a built in open deck bar I can put my own shortcuts on
I agree. The only issue with the touch bar was its placement. It should have been put above the function keys and not close to where accidental touch could reach it. If they can manage a bezel-free screen they should just figure out how to wedge it in that gap somehow. But then I think they should do a MacBook Magic version where they slap screens on every key, the trackpad, and the Apple on the back just to see what people do with it.
I didn't like it for the same reasons people dislike touch controls in cars. The selection and placement of buttons is constantly changing, and I have to take my eyes off the screen to see what I can do on the TB at the time. I had an MBP with one for 5 years and barely ever used any of the features. The only thing I really found useful was the scroll bar for videos, which is useful on abysmal video players like Instagram which otherwise don't have that function.
The first iteration of the touch bar didn't have a physical escape key. I'm not even a VI user but that was my main complaint. I barely use function keys so I was ok with them being virtual (they showed up when I was in the terminal). But I did love adding a custom screenshot button to it and I loved the way the volume and brightness controls worked.
I tend to rest my left hand on the keyboard while reading, etc. Sometimes my fingers move up to the touch bar and that causes some sort of action I didn't intend. That's very annoying. All the other buttons on the keyboard act buttons you have to press.
The top of the keyboard is literally the worst location I can think there to be a short, long touchscreen.
Maybe it's not a problem for people with tiny hands but I'm bordering on, "palm a basketball" size.
I'm seconding this. I am on my M2, and the lack of the touch bar is one of the reasons I am holding off on upgrading it. The keyboard goes the path of all apple keyboards, but right now I prefer it to no touchbar.
I liked the idea, and found it useful (but I have smaller fingers). The biggest issue was how buggy it was, especially in earlier laptops. If it doesn't respond (common bug), then you now have no function keys, screen brightness keys, etc.
I always thought the ideal version of that technology would have been as an overlay on top of the trackpad that can be invoked by pressing or holding a button. They’d have even been able to fake button presses with the haptics in there so you could do things like fake a num pad, set up a macro pad, or use it like a stream deck.
I agree with the doomerism, and I expect the end goal would be merging MacOS UI with iPadOS. so the Mac will be an iPad with a keyboard. Clumsy , low-resolution controls that depend on clumsy touch experiences instead of lightning fast keyboard shortcuts.
The end result will be akin to taking keyboards away from Platinum league top tier Korean pro RTS players. 500+ operations per minute down to 10
It’s funny how disconnected macOS users are from reality when it comes to laptop touch screens.
That just hasn’t happened with Windows touch screens.
Yes, Microsoft did fuck around and find out with Windows 8, but by the time Windows 10 landed an entire decade ago, this whole issue has been completely settled. That’s right, your Windows/Linux user friends have been using touchscreens (or no touch screens) without issue for a decade. No UX sky has fallen in this regard.
There’s absolutely zero downside to having a touch screen on Windows and you also absolutely don’t need a touch screen to use it.
I’m using a touch screen on my Linux laptop right now and it’s great. I don’t have to use it. The screen being touch didn’t cost me extra money. It’s just there if I want it.
The Apple camp seems to believe that every technology included with a product must have some kind of intentional holistic value. Apple removed the USB-A port because USB-C is the future. Apple removed the escape key and the function keys because the Touch Bar would replace it.
But the truth of the matter is, sometimes the option to just include both isn’t some kind of magical barrier that Apple can’t do.
You go out and buy a ThinkPad X9 15p and it has 3x thunderbolt, HDMI, SD card, and USB-A. Why doesn’t a MacBook Pro include USB-A? Well, remember, USB-A is the past! It’s legacy!
But the thing about it being unnecessary doesn’t change the fact that it remains trivially expensive to include, and it comes in handy for a bunch of peripherals that aren’t even that old.
So, I think this is why everyone assumes that Apple is going to destroy the OS because of some new thing they add to the hardware. Because the Apple cult is all about the mythical finely crafted experience. If you don’t do things the Apple way you’re holding it wrong. but in Microsoft/Linux-land, they don’t really care. Linux is fully free, and Microsoft knows their demographic net is too wide and their marketshare is too high that they can’t dictate form factor, choice of peripherals, etc. Their whole philosophy is that Windows is suitable for anything and everything.
The Apple culture can’t contemplate a technology company just including an extra option for users with no specific intended use case. PC manufacturers include a touch screen because, screw it, it only costs a few cents extra and maybe someone might like it, software integration be damned/that’s not our problem.
Windows 10 reversed a lot of the controversial UI changes from Windows 8, but the mouse/keyboard UX was still largely a regression from Windows 7 due to the introduction of giant padding regions on any new/redesigned software so people could use their fingers. Maybe people haven't noticed this as much because the economics have worked out such that most software is now designed for web/mobile first, so having giant padding regions on desktop is more normal.
Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.
That's not a justification for padding, it's a justification for scalable UI. A lot of those "classic" windows dialogs do not scale well on high DPI screens but they still work great with a mouse even if their scaling is ugly. The padding is just there for touch-friendliness.
I don't even agree with the premise in the first place if I'll be honest. Windows 11 is almost the same scale as Windows 7. The taskbar is the same size, the tray icons are the same size. Most of Microsoft's applications seem to all be roughly the same scale.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the Settings app being a downgrade from Control Panel and being too padded or whatnot, but let's not forget that the old Windows XP era Control Panel couldn't even be maximized. It was just one size no matter what.
I really strongly disagree. I've been using Windows since the 2.x 286/386 days. Windows 10 and 11 are still less functional, UI-wise, than Windows 7 was. They're still not capable of the information-density that Windows 7 was. They still have larger and less space-efficient widgets than Windows 7 did.
We forget this because Windows 7 was ugly and Windows 10 and 11 are nicer looking and that feels like progress, somehow. But you don't get nearly the functional information density with Windows 11 that you did with 7.
The problem isn't "make whole thing smaller". The problem is information density and controls. Windows wastes large areas of screen on huge white empty spaces, showing significantly less info in 100x more display area than win 95
And when Windows 95 came out we didn’t exactly have 27” 4K monitors at our desks.
I still don’t really see the information density problem. You can fully customize the OS scaling way more than you ever could with older OS versions. Again, things like windows task bar icons and tray icons are the exact same size as Windows 7. Yeah they’re bigger than Windows 95 but I only had 800x600 to work with in those days.
The comparison you're making is utilitarian design versus functional design.
Do I need to see a list of every single application on my computer (utilitarian) or do I need to see the applications I use the most and added most recently (functional)?
The "list every application ever" paradigm predated search indexing. There was no alternative to an alphabetical list of every installed application. On a desktop/laptop computer, I spend entire days without using the Start Menu/macOS Dock/Application Launcher (KDE's "start menu") as an actual method to launch programs. I'm hitting Command/Alt + Space or the Windows key and typing in the first letter or two of the program I'm trying to launch.
Information density was also a necessity of the era, not a design preference. You and I might prefer information density as power user coders or what have you. Do my parents prefer information density? Nope!
I would agree with you more broadly that the Windows 11 Start Menu isn't really a great design but I can see what they were going for. The execution isn't there but I think the overall idea makes sense.
We can also have the rose tinted glasses about Windows 95 with the cascading menus but it was really clunky when your application list gets really long or you have a lot of nested folders. It was easy to accidentally misclick or lose your sub-folder.
E.g., in that screenshot you posted, if I hovered my mouse over "Kids Choice" and wanted to get to a program inside there, but then I accidentally moved my mouse over "Visio Home SE" and lost the "Kids Choice" submenu selection, then I have to bring my mouse back to find it again.
> The comparison you're making is utilitarian design versus functional design.
No. The comparison I'm making is non-functional design vs. functional design.
Modern "designers" wouldn't know functional design if it hit them in the face and couldn't design one if their life depended on it.
> Do I need to see a list of every single application on my computer (utilitarian) or do I need to see the applications I use the most and added most recently (functional)?
Again, you're completely missing the meat of my argument while focusing on superficial.
The meat is: why the hell our huge 5k monitors manage to show less information on screen than 600x400 14" monitors of 30 years ago?
Your answer is "but scaling". No, scaling doesn't solve the issue. At best in modern designs you will see 11 items instead of 10. Where there's space for 50.
I wasn't saying that Win95 start menu was perfect. I was saying: modern start menu manages to show less information, and more poorly[1], on an area that is 10x the size of the entire screen available to Win95. And that this issue is repeated through the entire design of the OS.
[1] not to say more slowly, but that is an additional can of worms
the concern rests on the likely trajectory for the mac laptop.
Windows laptops never expected tough screen adoption to hit 90% and still touch degraded the experience.
The worry here is that with Apple's e2e design control over the Mac, that this pivot will mean our MacOS UX will be removed in lieu of a more iPad-like experience.
Just look at other developer-friendly features like unlocked bootloaders, background jobs, unsigned software that Apple has removed from their hardware .
So this is a big deal and significant. It's different than you running Linux on your Windows laptop because the touch experience there never had a chance to push out the traditional UX.
Maybe you are right in some non-zero way, but there are still some bits to consider:
Windows laptops have been majority touch screen for a long time, so in theory this touch experience could have pushed out the traditional windows experience more. With the exception of the repressed memories of Windows 8, it just hasn’t happened. Despite most Windows laptops coming with touch screens, the interface is very much mouse and keyboard oriented.
But also, Apple still can’t make Mac mini or Mac Studio users use a touch screen.
In theory the iMac could gain a touch screen, the Studio Display could gain one, but I think that’s very fundamentally different ergonomic situation than a laptop.
When I’m at a desk like a coffee shop I can rest my arm on the table and scroll the browser with my thumb at the lowest part of the screen very easily on a laptop. A desktop computer screen is a lot different than that, usually sitting higher and further away, so I still think every desktop Apple sells will stick with non-touch for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps the strongest indicator is just that Apple has Microsoft as a case study. Everyone saw what happened with Windows 8 and knows not to repeat that sort of debacle.
Finally, I have to imagine that software development tools are much better now where it’s easier to make dynamic interfaces where user preference can rule the day.
One difference is that Apple has always considered it their job and divine right to tell you how to use your computer, where Windows a d Linux never have.
Microsoft produces an OS. Linux is an OS. When a hardware partner of Microsoft wants to introduce touchscreen laptops Microsoft has to support them. Is it realistic that Microsoft tells them to pound sand and the partner ships the hardware with Linux? No. Whereas Apple is supposed to have an overarching design team. Someone that currently occupies the role Jony Ive occupied should have the power to tell the hardware team not to ship touchscreens in Macs.
Same, I randomly scroll through a word document every few months when I remember it's a touch screen, only to never do it again for another few months,.
I don't think it's quite that bad, but I’m already in the habit of swatting the hands of people who point too closely at things on my laptop screen with their greasy fingers. gtfo
I disagree. One of the key differentiators is that technology is being introduced in the highest cost, highest capability sku in their product lineup. This laptop costs more than my first car, although I’m old :)
What Microsoft introduced touch surfaces, they came out of the train wreck of Longhorn and they were under the belief that they could push windows down to phones. Reality was that they pushed touch surfaces in a barbell distribution… ultra high end and ultra low end. Mostly low end as screen costs were super high.
With Apple, look at the pencil and the iPad. They’ve had a lot of fits and starts, but the Apple Pencil didn’t fundamentally change the iPad, but it did open the door for a very high value use cases for things like procreate.
Judging by the Apple marketing page, touch is used for (1) scroll; (2) zoom; (3) draw. I hope that’s all the ways touch can be used. It’s a bad idea to expect touch to be used instead of the cursor to click on buttons.
I think this can easily be seen in the introduction of windows into iPad OS. I hate when the wrong motion creates a window from what I was working with. And this is on the 11" pro.
You can turn that off, by the way. Settings -> Multitasking and Gestures -> select Full Screen Apps. Just turns all that off. I honestly don't mind it on my Air but on the Mini is just fucking useless as a feature so I know this lol
And they turn it on by default. If Steve Jobs were around, it would have either worked better or it would have been sold better and those in charge kicked in the nuts. Apple's UX team SUCKS these days.
Introducing features nobody asked for with clever bs gestures, then forcing the user to undo their effect using obscure keyboard sequences or settings one has to lookup on the web is absolutely terrible UI, and something that would've never passed under Jobs' reign. It's not just the iPad windows misfeature, Mac OS' full screen mode has that problem as well. Whoever is responsible for that should seriously consider their career choices. There are PLENTY ergonomic problems to take care of, such as the error-prone keyboard entry on iOS, the Finder not showing full paths in Info details, broken window focus management (clicking a window tops ALL windows of the app), Spotlight, Expose refactored into uselessness (is it even there still?), the list goes on.
Windows 8.1 was a great OS. Touchscreen seems to have driven movement toward low-anination, so the start menu opened instantly. Touch forced big-ness on the start menu, so it wasn't so damned cluttered when you opened it up. If you started looking at lists, though, the text was pretty close together and somehow a great font and shape for looking through lots of text.
I think they introduced this feature for the 'Pro' macbook for some reason (and I don't mean the price).
But for example, as iOS Developer, this is something I could use to test apps in different simulators.
So, it seems Apple is not promoting the touch screen as the main control, but just as something additional to the trackpad and keyboard. Like 'This will be useful in specific scenarios'.
OK, yeah, that would be handy. Hated touch on the last laptop (Dell XPS of some sort), only ever touched it by accident or had _other_ people touch it by accident but this would be handy.
Apple has focused on making touch a useful additional input method in certain situations, and avoided redesigning the entire experience around touch. The latter is what iPhones and iPads are all about, and we have learned more over time about how that does not scale well to a laptop.
But there is an intermediate point somewhere between “no touch” and “all touch” that I think could make sense for a modern laptop that is created for a generation of people who are brought up with iPhones and iPads.
I can’t imagine this feature being useful for me, but I would appreciate the better OLED screen on my regular MacBook Pro. And a lighter machine to boot. And if I can turn off the touch features, then I’d be pretty happy with the hardware — if not the price.
There seem to be two paths for the Mac: integration, aka subject to the iphone, and become less appealing, or being split off into a separate company, and probably going extinct. Not saying that are the only two sensible outcomes, but shareholders and bonus vying execs always want to stir things up, so may choose one of these two easy paths for short-term profit, and there's no turning back.
I mean, if this is what you've been waiting for forever and it changes your life for the better, then congrats. But I think this will wind up being a huge net-negative for most Mac users as macOS is made to look and feel more and more like iPadOS.
I look forward to being able to plug my iPad into my non-touch MacBook, though, and using its touch screen as an external MacOS-touch enabled peripheral.
That’ll hold me over until the next generation of touchscreen MBP’s, or at least until touch is just a normal feature in the Apple world, whichever comes first ..
When the updates are boring people complain that they don't change anything. When they take risks (touchscreen on laptop, foldable phone) people complain about the new stuff.
I like that they do this. If it doesn't catch on, they will change back, like with the touch bar.
With the difference that Apple has got a near monopoly on tablets.
I don't like touch screens, they are a counter-pattern for a laptop. Yet I don't mind people liking it and using it. But I am in fear that the UI will get impacted also for non-users.
Probably not because at the end of the day the employees and engineers at Apple have to use the Mac and macOS to write software so there's a concrete floor that they can't break through in terms of usability. They may make some mistakes or something but the OS has basically been the same thing for like 20 years. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
100% agree
We should assume that new engineering leadership that came - it was too late.
Let’s pray that MacBook pro team will leave apple sooner or later to build alternative laptop.
This touchscreen seems to be bifurcation point with no return. I hope we also get alternative for M-class cpu, this might be the biggest dealbreaker
> Touch-screen Macs is kind of a terrible development for anyone who loves the Mac
Agreed. There has been a long history of the clarity and usability of teams having a single focus. I mean we’re still feeling the negative downstream effects of the “3D touch” last seen on the XS.
For those who are too young to know what I’m talking about: you missed out on a level of elegance and refinement that probably won’t be replicated
Hahahaha have you even used macOS starting with tahoe? the liquid glass ui was made for touch! it is literally the antithesis of mouse-driven design. the buttons are large and circular, with huge corner radii. huge gaps in between them as well.
You make an interesting point, but I still shudder at the idea of multitasking on a 14” screen with the 40-50 elements I need being finger sized + aesthetic padding
Buttons sized to be hit by your physical thumb and buttons sized to be hit by a tiny high-precision cursor are very different things.
I am sitting on a macbook pro with the vertical tab pane open in chrome, with 12 tabs. The outer joint of my thumb covers the entire list, in both width and height. A touch-friendly version of that would be humongous in comparison.
Perhaps it is with a heavy dose of copium that I say: I hope the extremely tentative development and release of this product (after having been on the record as fervently against touchscreen laptops), along with the eye-watering price point indicates that this isn't being viewed as the future of the MacOS experience. I hope this remains framed as a true pro-focused experience that unlocks specific apps without greatly impacting the central MacOS design philosophy.
It’s actually kind of startling just how bad, as measured by open issues, Codex is. There’s a huge issue with conversation locking that nullifies one of Codex’s key advantages (GUI<->CLI interoperability) and last night I learned that conversations can get into a permanently-locked state where even shutting down every Codex process won’t unlock a conversation.
You add to that all of the weird confusion over Chat/Work/Cloud Work/Work Local modes and marooned conversations, broken connectors (will OpenTable ever work? Will the Chrome connector ever be reliable on restart?) questionable UI decisions, and I start to worry a whole lot less about being replaced by AI.
It’s not even that Astra is bad at coding - it’s magnificent at coding. But it’s like it’s pure Id - all energy and first order logic but no taste or reason or preference. I guess that’s what we’re supposed to be doing now.
And yet Astra is as good if not much better coding than opus 5.5, both in the code generated and its guardrails. In fact in the last 3 weeks at work I’ve had opus 5.5 histrionically freak out about examining security issues with our app multiple times. What good is that?
It’s just that Codex, the harness, is hot garbage. I’m going to invest some time in using Astra with OpenCode to see if I can live with that but going back to Anthropic is very low on my preference list.
People will buy Macs and iPhones even if they don’t have AI. In fact at this point, based on revealed market preferences, it’s almost a value add. And if the AI capitalization bubble bursts, most people would be ok with OpenAI or Anthropic going bust. Both of them going bust would be really disappointing, but even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. And Meta going bust would almost be a side benefit of a market crash.
But Apple going bust would be a genuine loss for the world. So I’m glad they’re being conservative.
(Not that I would be happy with either anthropic or OpenAI going bust - I hope they can weather whatever is ahead).
Yeah, it ultimately hasn’t hurt Apple much so far. Though eventually expectations may shift as AI gets better integrated into other phones.
Of course, there are a lot of AI features that we take for granted that aren’t LLMs, like speech to text, image foreground extraction, etc. Apple does tend to do this type of AI well.
I don't know about incompetent - there's plenty of smart people around Trump. The big problem seems to be that they all kind of disagree with each other and Trump ends up doing what the guy who talks to him most recently advises him to do.
The current "plan" seems to be to leave behind the largely-defunct WTO once and for all and build a selective free-trade alliance specifically excluding China, much like GATT was. I don't think this would really make the US "richer" (or any participant in the alliance) - in fact it would probably make us all a bit poorer. But it would make China much poorer which at this point is kind of the goal.
Which "smart" person advised him to calculate tariffs based on trade imbalance for each country, including uninhabited islands? It's an utterly stupid idea that makes no sense at all.
If you read Miran's paper, the point of the tariffs is to bring US trade partners to the table to negotiate the alliance, so really they could be anything at all. It could have been 420% or 31.4159% or whatever, right across the board.
But the amounts are actually kind of clever and it reflects the fact that there's a more mature understand of trade barriers now vs when the WTO was negotiated.
How much do you know about trade barriers? Beyond tariffs, they're extraordinarily complicated and rely on regulations, trip-wires, and unequal application of rules.
Canada has "free trade" with dairy, but only on dairy imports up to a point, and after that heavy tariffs apply. But no one ever imports enough to incur those tariffs, so, that's free-trade, right? But actually, no one considers the Canadian dairy market worth the trouble without being able to import large amounts of dairy. So Canada can legitimately say that the trip-wire isn't applied, but it's a long ways from "free trade" because large importers are kept out.
China requires that foreign companies must partner with local companies to sell into the Chinese market. This effectively leads to a lot of technology transfers. It's not a tariff, but it's pretty clearly a "trade barrier" because companies that want to protect their IP are denied access.
In the 80's when US trade reps were negotiating with Japanese trade reps, the Americans would try to convince the Japanese that free trade was best for Japanese consumers. The Japanese reps would just respond, "how much do you want us to buy?"
The Japanese really didn't believe in free trade, and they were actively manipulating the value of the Yen at that point (it would be a few years still before the Plaza Accord), so they knew that just lowering tariffs wasn't going to make US goods sufficiently more competitive in Japan.
What's changed in 35 years is that the US doesn't really believe in "free trade" anymore either - not after all of the grief the WTO brought. The simple formulas are a no-bullshit approach to trade - the same ones that motivated those Japanese trade reps.
"I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."
> just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance
But why does each individual country's trade need to be perfectly balanced with the US? What are the odds of that happening for every single country? What are the odds of it working for every possible pair of countries?
I agree with you, but I also think you have this idea that trade is currently governed by largely linear and symmetric rules in Ricardian harmony, and that just isn’t the case.
Every industrialized exporting country in the world has optimized for exporting to the US, and there’s plenty of govt policy involved. Trade barriers are the norm, not the exception. If other countries optimize their trade rules, regulations, and money supply to optimize for a sizeable trade surplus with the US, they can change their policy to reduce the surplus.
The word “optimize” is being used a lot here, and I think it’s covering up the clear lack of a plan.
The USA exports plenty of goods, and in cases where there are these nebulous “trade barriers” being imposed, they should be investigated, discovered, publicized, and negotiated. That work was clearly not done here.
> I also think you have this idea that trade is currently governed by largely linear and symmetric rules
I didn't think that. Every country has tariffs and trade barriers to protect the industries they want to grow or protect. Even the US. Even before this administration or the last one, or the one before that. Sugar, for example.
> Every industrialized exporting country in the world has optimized for exporting to the US
Or maybe, more accurately, to earn US dollars. Possibly because of petroleum, which every country needs? I don't really know, I'm not an expert.
Read the Miran paper. It’s not about imbalances. It’s about negotiating leverage. Australia in particular is going to be the most interesting case in the world.
Strategically, Australia is more sympathetic to the US, but your trade with China is many multiples of your trade with the US. If you join the US you’ll have to raise tariffs against China and if you don’t you’ll naturally fall into China's orbit. Interesting times!
- These tariffs are permanent to rebalance trade
- These tariffs are temporary to use for negotiations
If they're permanent:
- US companies build factories
- Manufacturing comes back to the US
- China is left manufacturing what the US can't do locally
- China will dramatically up cost of resources US can't source elsewhere
- Nobody wins
If they're temporary:
- China waits out the storm
- Prices revert back to the mean
- Nobody wins
So either way:
- Countries have divested US exports
- US has lost long term income
- US has lost soft power (and eventual hegemony)
- There's now a lot of pissed off people
Even looking at what's happening to Las Vegas, the number of pissed off people will likely go up even if tariffs went back to before or brand new trade deals were signed across all trade paths let alone even a handful.
I'd be keen to know your thoughts. And thanks - I just added the Miran paper to my Kindle, so thanks for the reference!
> Strategically, Australia is more sympathetic to the US, but your trade with China is many multiples of your trade with the US. If you join the US you’ll have to raise tariffs against China and if you don’t you’ll naturally fall into China's orbit. Interesting times!
As an Australian, I'd put the odds of Australia imposing strong tariffs on anyone at very close to zero.
After we gave up on tariffs about 20 years ago we've seen only growth. We are one of the few (only) western economy to have not had a recession in that time. It's not something we are likely to give up on easily. Both the major political parties have firmly re-iterated a "no tariffs" policy.
As for "moving towards China" - I don't see much evidence of that. Australia is firmly rooted in the West. But there has been a change. Right now, I think it's true to say Australia is wondering if Trump's USA is as firmed root in the West as rest of the OECD is. I guess it's possible Australia may drift away from the USA as a consequence, but it won't be towards China. And it won't happen in the short term as Trump's USA is viewed as a temporary thing that will end with Trump.
None of this has much to do with the topic the paper is discussing. Australia has also been on the receiving end of China's industrialisation, so I imagine most Australian's would look on with interest and sympathy at the USA's attempt to undo the worst effects.
Give up your whole notion of “should”. There is no “should”. The formula is for aligning incentives. It’s no longer enough for other govts to claim compliance with abstract requirements while clandestinely working against them - they need to be committed to helping importers succeed.
Negotiate about what? There isn't even a clear ask from the US side when they base everything on trade imbalances. Attempting to bring those to zero makes no sense and would do more harm than good. A country like Vietnam is not able to able enough expensive US goods to offset their exports to the US. Trying to squeeze these countries serves no purpose, and the absolute trade volumes with a lot of the smaller countries are so small that it's not even worth putting in the effort to attempt to negotiate anything.
So, what do they want? It is pretty clear by now that they don't even know. They started a massive trade war without a clear plan or way out, and now they are progressively walking it back and attempting to negotiate some quick, face saving deals like the UK one that barely does anything.
And if they really are worried about China, then they need allies to be able to isolate the Chinese and put enough pressure on them. Except, they have just alienated everyone who could have helped with that.
These are not the actions of some master strategist, but of someone who is in way over his head.
You're being downvoted because you're repeating trivially disproven, clear nonsense... which is unfortunately the official position of the whitehouse.
> "I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."
Except that that is NOT what is going on. Trump has been screaming something to this effect for weeks, but when it comes to actually negotiating something he tells world leaders that the tariffs are there to stay! He just did this with the Japanese PM, mere days ago.
Not to mention that many countries have actual, effective tariffs or "trade barriers" on the order of 1% with the US, which means that he can't possible negotiate anything that will improve things more than that.
Trump has no actual strategy. He can't possibly, because his stated list of goals are mutually incompatible. He also wants to eliminate income tax and pay for this with tariffs! He can't do that and return tariffs to 0% after countries capitulate.
He also keeps talking about bringing manufacturing back to the US (note that it never left, it just got more high-tech), but he's tariffing industrial machinery and robots imported from Germany!
This "policy" makes about as much sense as a first-year student's homework essay thrown together the night before it is due.
Anyone engaging in good faith debates is missing the point entirely. There is nothing of substance to engage with, as multiple world leaders are discovered.
PS: Trump apparently made 200 deals, more than the number of countries in the world, then 17, and now just 1 with the UK, where he reduced tariffs from 1% to 0.8%. Wooo! Winning!
Like I said, he takes the advice of the last person who talks to him. He’s very suggestible. The best parts of his presidency, so far, have been when he follows the plan in project 2025, which you may not agree with, but is at least sane and coherent. The worst bits are when he adlibs, like the stupid tariff escalation with China.
Ultimately the biggest problem with Miran’s plan is that now that Trump is tearing up these trade agreements, no one has any reason to believe that the new one is worth the paper it’s printed on. He has no integrity and no one signs agreements with people who have no integrity.
> he takes the advice of the last person who talks to him
> Ultimately the biggest problem with Miran’s plan is that now that Trump is tearing up these trade agreements, no one has any reason to believe that the new one is worth the paper it’s printed on
And to apocryphally quote Game of Thrones:
> A Trump never pays his debt
Yep. Political opinions aside, these combined are his hamartia and so it will be interesting to see in the near future if he's able to maintain his reality distortion field over the GOP or we'll ever see Vance stab him in the back.
For the record, I'm not really sure how I feel about this plan. Free trade with China uplifted 700 million people (in China) from poverty.
OTOH, if you believe that China is basically Germany circa 1938 (and indeed, China in 2025 is the largest and most successful fascist state in all of history), then kneecapping China's economy makes plenty of strategic sense.
But we could always just keep buying Hitler's Volkswagens - that's the direction our incentive gradient points in. The US doesn't need to be the global police - we could always just let China have Taiwan, the Senkakus, the Ryukyus, etc...
I think what a lot of people miss when they talk about America being the “global police” is that almost always the law (so to speak) that the “global police” are enforcing is enforcing is the advancement of American interests.
It seems both backwards and perfectly sensible that the country with the biggest debts is also the country with the biggest stick. It’s backwards because it seems counterintuitive to any mafia-style arrangement where the guy with the big stick is collecting the money. But it’s sensible because the safest debtor is one that won’t default, and why would the country with the biggest stick ever want to default?
It’s almost like some twisted version of Mutually Assured Destruction mixed with economics and realpolitik. As long as you don’t try to collect your money, it’s safe and profitable to lend me more of it. Because of the implication…
I used Darcs a long time ago and what I remember was that because it reordered patches, it was actually quite difficult to do a bisect to find a patch that broke a build. Unlike git where you can completely characterize a build with the HEAD sha, darcs didn’t really have that concept and it was very tricky to figure out what actually went into a particular build.
It didn’t really seem to me at the time like this was an appropriate VCS for a team of developers using CI.
Sadly, no. 32-bit ARM only has 16 GPR’s (two of which are zero and link), mostly because of the stupid predication bits in the instruction encoding.
That said, I don’t know how valuable getting rid of FP on ARM is - I once benchmarked ffmpeg on 32-bit x86 before and after enabling FP and PIC (basically removing 2 GPRs) and the difference was huge (>10%) but that’s an extreme example.
Arm32 doesn’t have a zero-value register. Its non-general-purpose registers are PC, LR, SP, FP – tho the link register can be used for temporary values.
Not all speech in Canada is protected, and never has been. Even in the US, there are (albeit far more narrow) carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport).
Nobody has been or ever will be jailed for talking about the FLQ crisis and internet searches for pictures of tanks on Canadian streets aren't banned from search engines, but I guess people can go off on their China and USSR comparisons.
The problem of holding platforms accountable for enforcing this is a chilling effect: speech that wouldn't be restricted even by the government gets taken down by the platforms as a proactive measure, to err on staying on the right side of the law. This is especially true of speech with nuance. (See GPT & Gemini's heavy-handed self-censorship as an example).
Nobody will be jailed, their posts will just be hidden or removed for non-compliance with the restrictive terms of the private platform.
It is, and it would be nice if it worked out that way, but the dynamics of two-sided markets are really sticky. You need more than a strong incentive, because your audience needs to come along too. And even federated platforms might find they don't want to hold the hot potato of legal accountability, and block Canadian IPs rather than try to ensure their moderation meets the Canadian government's standards.
And that's why you have community instances that are geographically tied. That's already happening (I mod at CoSocial.ca for instance).
You're right about networks being sticky, but Fedi is flourishing despite it, and if regulation further accelerates enshitification, I've no doubt we'll have a viable alternative to jump to.
I do hope so! (Just as I'd hoped that the government's earlier blunderous and heavy-handed fines for news links from Google and Facebook might move Canadians to looking into other sites like DDG, but it didn't seem like that really happened).
What would CoSocial.ca do about the risk of being held legally accountable for "harmful" content on your platform? The incentive to censor such content with a broad brush may be, if anything, stronger for you than for big companies like Facebook which have legal teams. Some content (like hate speech) might be pretty obvious, but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over. What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect? Now it's your responsibility to decide if the government is going to deem that post "harmful".
> but there might also be reasonable content that your platform could still risk a legal battle over
Yah that's totally fair, and like Michael Geist was quoted in the article as saying, the devil is in the details of this bill. I don't know what the letter of the law is here.
> What if -- say, it's early 2020 -- and someone writes a post arguing that Health Canada's official advice about masks is incorrect?
I understand where you are coming from, but I am personally (can't speak for the team) not worried about the legal liability here. If the law simply requires that platforms enforce the current letter of the law re: speech, then we will be just fine. I'll concede again that the devil is in the details of the legislation. If it's a bad law, bad things will happen.
Furthermore, there's usually carve outs for not-huge organisations (this is true of the link tax as well).
FWIW, we've already deleted or limited posts that have been COVID-denialism related when they are disruptive and/or harmful.
(that's why I chose a specific example of when Health Canada was in the wrong, and they later turned around and admitted masks do protect people, which was already clear to many people early on).
Carve-outs for small organizations would be great here, though!
> carve-outs for "harmful" speech (best not yell "fire" in a movie theatre or "bomb" in an airport)
Just a reminder that the US Constitution does not explicitly have a carve-out. This argument originated from a Supreme Court justice who wanted to establish a legal basis for censoring anti-war speech. The slippery slope does not even need to be speculated about; it was purposefully baked into the "harmful" speech classification from the beginning.
.local is used by mdns so your .local machines can conflict with discoverable devices and services. I guess they wanted something that wouldn't conflict?
That means Apple will begin imposing all sorts of UI dreck on all of us, whether we want to use our screens as touch surfaces or not.
This is basically what happened with Microsoft - Windows Vista and 7 were installed in plenty of laptops with touchscreens, and customers would complain about not being able to maximize windows without closing them, not being able to open menus without touching toolbar buttons, etc.
Eventually Microsoft listened to them and we got Windows 8. Now this is the beginning of the same process for macOS.
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