On That Touch MacBook Pro

I've used plenty of touchscreen laptops at this point. I had an old TouchSmart TM2 a while ago, and several mid-2010s Dell Latitudes that had touch bolted on. Save for the TouchSmart (which had a swivel display so you could turn it into a full-on tablet), one of the first things I did with these machines is went into Device Manager and killed the touchscreen drivers.

 

Because maybe I'm just built different or something but to me, touchscreens in laptops suck, have always sucked, and will continue to suck, especially from an ergonomic standpoint. In fact, Apple themselves (of course, when Jobs was still at the helm) mentioned this in a keynote! 

"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."

That first part about giving great demo is very much foreshadowing. We'll come back to that later.

In addition to having a number of touch-enabled laptops, I've had a number of touch-enabled all-in-ones and those were much the same from an ergonomic standpoint and also just as bad. Hell, I have one as my garage computer as we speak (from when these machines were hot shit back in 2012-2013, really a testament to how hard computing has plateaued). You'd think I'd enjoy having a touch machine there so I can keep my workbench clear of a traditional mouse and keeb, but nope. Trying to actuate the touchscreen is an ergonomics nightmare.

The only use case I ever found that worked was having such a machine as a big, bulky media player in the kitchen, where you're not touching it all that much, just enough to queue up music/YouTube/what have you. Otherwise my upper arm just hurts trying to use these things like I would, say, my phone.

Much like I implied with the TouchSmart example in the opening, however, this didn't apply to those 2-in-1 laptops that were hot shit back in the Windows 8 days (and now seem to have all but died off save for the Surface line of devices), mostly because you could fold the display over and bam, now you have a thick but otherwise somewhat normal tablet form factor.

The MacBook does none of these things. It's not a convertible. It's just a traditional laptop, but with touch bolted on. It does nothing exciting with it. I've seen people already saying "this will be great for creative apps like Final Cut!" but just trying to mock up that movement on my boring, old, probably-soon-to-be-deprecated MacBook, it just makes my arm hurt.

There's also the question of how will macOS respond to this kind of hardware? macOS is first and foremost a desktop operating system. It doesn't expect touch. Interface elements aren't designed for fingers. Microsoft tried--and failed--to address this with Windows 8 by forcing tablet interface paradigms down everyone's throats, and that went over like a lead balloon. 

Windows 10 went with more of a hybrid interface that adjusts to what you're using, but given where Apple's software quality has been as of late (macOS 27 has been a shitshow for me personally, same as several others) I really don't trust that they could pull off something like this without mucking it up somehow.

But even if they did, you can't fix how much of an ergonomic nightmare this is with software. But again, maybe I'm just built different.

"It Gives Great Demo"

Now, I'm saying this from the perspective of a normie who just popped open Instagram to see Apple's marketing for this thing. Because that's how I found out that oh, right, Apple was going to launch new hardware this week and today was the day for the oft-mentioned OLED/touch MacBook Pro.

 

The video was just of someone touching the screen and having the desktop wallpaper react with the room he's in, and yeah, it looks cool. But Apple--these are pro machines. Show me what these machines can do with touch that isn't just some fancy demo meant to woo a portion of the market that this machine isn't aimed at.

 

Even looking at Apple's official video on their website, the touchscreen portion feels like a blink and you'll miss it kind of thing, and everything that is demonstrated, especially swiping between desktops...you can quite literally do the same gesture on the very generous touchpad that Apple gives you with their laptops, and it'll feel way more comfortable.

 

Apple has also shown someone playing piano keys in this setup, and again, trying to mimic this on my boring non-touch machine, it just feels wrong, and I don't mean that in a good way. I mean that in a "my wrists are going to hate me if I do this for more than five minutes and that's being generous."

 

There's some irony in Jobs calling this out 16 years ago, because that's effectively what Apple showed us today. The touchscreen giving us great demo, and that's really it. The touchbar had more practicality than this.Even if the demos were kinda weird at first.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if these things still sell like hotcakes for reasons not related to the touchscreen, but I am going to be curious how many people continue to use the touchscreen outside of the new shiny thing honeymoon period.