If they had put the touch bar below the keyboard not above and left the function keys alone it would be worked much better IMO.
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Apple's Work on Touchscreen Macs: What We Know So Far
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If they had put the touch bar below the keyboard not above and left the function keys alone it would be worked much better IMO.
touchscreen on a laptop is the most useless thing in existence and i hope apple will never put a touchscreen on their MacBook's
I would never buy a touchscreen Mac and hope Apple does not go down this silly route.
The annoying touchscreen PC laptops are bad enough.
If you want a touchscreen, buy an iPad.
The annoying touchscreen PC laptops are bad enough.
If you want a touchscreen, buy an iPad.
Don't worry, the Apple Vision Pro proves that Apple doesn't think touchscreens are the future. Touchscreen interfaces are terribly inaccurate, that's why iPadOS is so different from MacOS. I doubt we'll ever have to deal with touchscreens on the Mac. People who say they want it are just failing to imagine how terrible it would be.
Or they have used touchscreens on iPads with keyboard and on other laptops with touchscreens and like the experience of having an alternate, optional way of interacting that is more efficient for some actions and provides a variation in movement that helps with RSI.
I know that my iPad in its keyboard case is most definitely not free of fingerprints, but I’m OK with that. When it’s too much, I just wipe them off and start over again.
The touch screen on Windows laptops is annoying, but the touch screen on iPads aren't annoying, even when you're using them with a keyboard. There is a difference here. The Windows laptop interprets touch as if your finger is moving and clicking the mouse. iPadOS interprets it as an actual finger touch, and so could macOS.
Apple has already created an unobtrusive and seamless experience where you can have a touch screen and a keyboard and trackpad on the same device.
On the iPad, I can put the mouse somewhere on the page, use my finger to scroll down, and when I move the mouse again it's right where I left it. Seamless.
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How are they incompatible concepts? You can use an iPad on a Magic Keyboard right now and it has a touch screen, and it works great. Being able to use all three input methods side by side actually can speed things up and make some things more fluid and easy. Sometimes it's as simple as using your thumb on the bottom corner of the touch screen to scroll down a webpage - which can help with RSI when you use trackpads a lot.
Apple adds better displays, better chips, etc to their laptops all the time. Why would this be any different? If Apple adds touch screens, they'll eventually do it across all models. You can't buy low resolution screen macbooks anymore can you.
I know, I’ve got one. It runs iPadOS, my MBP runs macOS.
Besides, while I have the iPad Pro attached to the magic keyboard, I never touch the screen. Except when support for magic keyboard is broken in some app and certain actions only work by touching.
But how are they incompatible concepts? If you use the touch screen and the trackpad/keyboard interchangeably you can work quicker when you get good at it. And some things, like casual scrolling, do work better on it.
Not that you have to use it, but I don't get how they're incompatible concepts being smashed together.
This is precisely it. If you use a laptop trackpad every day you can certainly start getting RSI from it. Being able to use the touch screen on the iPad some of the time to scroll or incidentally tap around has been a game changer for me.
I use a combination of a mouse and the trackpad at my desk, the trackpad when I'm on the go at work, and on the iPad in my leisure time a combination of the touch screen and trackpad. It keeps me strain free.
If I just use the MacBook and trackpad I eventually start getting RSI again. The best way to avoid RSI is to use different input methods to balance things out.
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Just put a macOS on an iPad Pro 12.9 already. Apple could sell their iPad keyboards as well. You got a full fledged touch screen laptop right there. It is already in their inventory. What’s so difficult about it.
However, if Apple would allow a touch screen on the Macbooks Pro so that Pencil would work, now that would clearly redefine a laptop and it will be perfect.
However, if Apple would allow a touch screen on the Macbooks Pro so that Pencil would work, now that would clearly redefine a laptop and it will be perfect.
Hell ya. Mouse, trackpad, finger, and pencil…. all alternating with one another with zero lag in between.
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macOS is not designed for touch input. Apple isn’t about to redesign their most powerful operating system just to get it on a tablet; Microsoft attempted this with Windows 8 and it was a monumental failure. The moment you begin to make changes, you begin to sacrifice one experience just to make another available, until neither are that good.
iPad’s are touch interfaces first and keyboard-trackpad interfaces second. This is why they are sold as an accessory and not a required component of the system. An iPad should be easy enough for a grandma to use but capable enough to accommodate a range of different features for a broad range of users. As has been proven, this is becoming increasingly difficult as Apple has had to balance usability with capability, and in some instances it's already ruffled feathers.
Also, releasing a ‘macOS-only-for-this-ipad-not-another’ would be a stupid decision since the capabilities of the iPad line would become blurred.
Further, even if Apple could and wanted to design a 2-in-1 device, it makes more business sense for them to sell different classes of product to consumers.
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They don't need to design macOS for touch input at all. Just allow touch.
There are things you can't accomplish on the iPad with a keyboard and mouse - but it's fine, and everyone is OK with it because you always have the touch screen there.
There are things you wouldn't be able to accomplish on a Mac with touch - but it's fine, and everyone would be OK with it because you always have the keyboard and trackpad bolted on to the laptop.
But the interface isn’t optimised for touch. This is a lot more complicated than people often realise and boils down to both conceptual and technical decisions.
When you use an iPhone for instance, you take it for granted than buttons are designed a particular way and act in a certain fashion, but to enable both to work properly and with consistency isn’t just as simple as ‘activating’ a touch surface.
Imagine trying to use the traffic light buttons on a window with a finger. First, they are no where near large enough to be easily pressed (and the scale must accommodate different devices). The software must then know that you intend to press one button over another because of the proximity.
And from a purely conceptual level, Apple would need to market specific devices as having a touchscreen macOS compatibility and not others - and justify those decisions.
Further, the products themselves would need to be completely re-engineered. A MacBook display is not just an iPad display bolted onto a notebook, it’s been designed specifically not to be touched with pressure and that is precisely why it is so thin and has excellent lamination.
Finally, the trackpad is simply good enough for many tasks that you would use a touchscreen for anyway, from scrolling to zooming to moving windows. The few specific activities that an iPad excels at is enhanced by the fact that the iPad is designed specifically to be held a certain way and used a certain way.
This only reiterated my original point; that the keyboard and mouse are accessories and not integral to the iPad experience. They exist to help users in specific experiences.
Again, this difference being that the Mac hardware would need to be completely re-engineered, marketed, priced and sold.
I’m absolutely not against the concept of a ‘convertible’ and I still maintain that the iPad + Magic Keyboard is a brilliant combination. However, I do believe that if Apple is to pursue a convertible for their most powerful OS in the future, it will be a product line different to the Mac. It would be brand new so as start off with a clean slate for development, not building on top of a legacy platform.
It is absolutely that simple. The iPad accepts touch and keyboard and mouse input simultaneously, and there is no issue at all.
Imagine trying to type on the on screen keyboard with an Apple pencil on an iPad. You could, but would you? You wouldn't. Just like you wouldn't go for the traffic lights with your finger. Just because you can use an input method, doesn't mean it has to be perfect for every single facet of what the device is capable of.
Right, and that's what I'm saying they should do. Apple is good at re-engineering things.
Nah, the iPad feels great to use with a keyboard, trackpad, and touch input simultaneously. All 3 is better than one or the other.
And touch screens on laptops are not exactly the same? Not integral to the experience, but helps users in certain scenarios.
Yes, that is generally what happens when you make a new version of a product. The 14"/16" MacBook Pros were also "completely re-engineered, marketed, priced and sold". That's what Apple does as a company.
Well, yes, that is true.
However, sometimes there is no choice. For example when upgrading to the downgrade, in my opinion, that is current MacBook Pros. I have a video port I seldom use, I lose a USB-C, actually two, if I have to power the machine on the right due to logistical issues and can't use the MagSafe. And don't get me started about the legacy card slots...
However, as the group has been upgrading from the mistake that is the late 2016 MacBook Pro, we have no choice. I would be worried that at some point in the future MacBook Pros with touch screens are foisted upon users.
The macOS UI would likely be changed to optimize it for touch. This would result in a ton of compromises that currently don’t have to be made.
Just like iPadOS had a ton of compromises when they added mouse and keyboard support. Oh, wait, there were none.
Adding a mouse and keyboard to a system with large enough buttons to work with touch interaction doesn’t require any UI changes at all. Adding touch control and interaction to a system with tiny buttons that aren’t sized large enough for touch interactions is different. You’d have to make a bunch of UI alterations to make the touch control and interactions function well, such as increasing button sizing and padding, hiding more options in drop downs and popups, etc. By the time you resize and rework the UI to actually be able to make use of the touch interaction, you’d essentially have iPadOS. Again, iPadOS can easily accommodate trackpad and keyboard support because no UI changes need to be made to the system to make it actually work well. With touch interaction, you need to resize UI elements, add more padding around buttons, etc. in order to make it a worthwhile feature and in order to make it a reasonable experience to use, and by the time you make all of those modifications, you just end up with essentially iPadOS. Just look at Windows, every button on Windows is bigger in order to try to accommodate touch interaction, and it wastes more screen real-estate, hides more options in drop-downs, and can wind up looking rather goofy on a big monitor.