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I have long been torn on the idea of touch screen on a Mac. I feel like by now Windows should have shown us that the different ways in controlling the OS leads

I have long been torn on the idea of touch screen on a Mac. I feel like by now Windows should have shown us that the different ways in controlling the OS leads to problems and just doesn't mesh well. You end up with buttons that are way to large to allow for finger taps that make no sense with a mouse, so a lot of wasted space. Forcing stupid gestures and UI animations that make zero sense with a keyboard and mouse. And of course, the fact that you have legacy applications that will never be updated to fully support it (and likely even new ones) and the experience will never be great. A single device that is meant to be fully usable with a k/m and touch screen is always going to be a compromise for one (or both) setups. At least iPad OS while you can attach a k/m (with decent results if really not how it was designed to be used) the OS is clearly touch first. I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both with the respect that each input method deserves. The only way I really see that possible is if the OS forces every application to use built in libraries for navigation, buttons, etc (and I mean force!, like it would not run if you don't use it) and the OS then shifts between the 2. But even then you could not naturally switch between, oh I am typing but let me just press this button on the screen because the OS would be on a specific mode. Its easy to say that Apple just wants to sell us another device, but let's not forget that Microsoft tried and failed... horribly... And we still see the problems with this idea in Windows 11.

jwells89 3y ago
I’m not sold on the idea of touch on laptops either, particularly since it often comes with compromises that make the display worse at its traditional job — large touch-sensitive screens are typically glossy and have some of the worst antiglare coating I’ve ever encountered, to which the iPad is not exempt (treating glass to be both oleophobic and antiglare must be cost prohibitive beyond smartphone sizes or something), as well as visible touch sensitive wire matrices which is commonly seen on touchscreen PC laptops. I think the idea would be better implemented by a second screen on a swiveling laptop lid. This allows the user to signal to the OS to toggle touch specializations by way of closing or swiveling the lid and lets the main display remain a great no-compromises traditional laptop display.
forgotmypw17 3y ago
I've been using a laptop/tablet with Windows 11 and touchscreen for a while now. It has many problems and is so janky and is really annoying sometimes and it's also so much better than being without it.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I really think this is the big issue. No disrespect to people who feel differently, but I do not use the touchscreens on laptops for anything substantial. I had one, for years, and I used it probably a handful of times for actual tasks, and the vast majority of the time, it was to like... dismiss a dialog box when I wasn't actually using the machine and was standing over it to where the mouse was out of reach. A mouse is fast, precise, and most importantly, does not block the screen with itself while in use. Your hand is none of those things, and unless you use the screen in the exact same orientation in the exact same place day after day, you'll find it markedly harder to develop muscle memory with regard to it. And, if your software updates, all that could go out the window anyway. A mouse feels like a mouse, barring some hardware change. Once you have your settings dialed in, you know on an instinctual, unconscious level how far it takes to get from here to there. Add to it, even the most basic mouse has two discreet actions- left and right click- out of the box. The shittiest mouse you can find has those two buttons, and these days, probably a third too with the mouse wheel click. A touch is a touch, unless it's a long-press (but don't move your hand by mistake, or it's now a drag) or if you touch with two or more fingers (but that might also mean you want to touch two things? And if you add any lateral movement at all the software will struggle even more.) And all of that happens with zero feedback to the user. Touch screens have a much harder time implementing haptics, and you could use sound but not everyone is going to be comfortable with that. Don't get me wrong, I love my phones and my tablets. But I have no desire at all for touch features on any of my computers, Mac or Windows or Linux. It's just not a good interface for when I need to Get Shit Done.
- dr_kiszonka 3y ago
  I use a convertible laptop for taking handwritten notes, annotating PDFs, "prototyping" plots, and occasional drawing. I tried navigating the OS using touch, but it is pretty inconvenient and, in my case, not very ergonomic.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    Oh yeah, I have a Kindle Scribe my wife got me for my birthday and it's bloody amazing for taking quick notes and making doodles, diagrams, that sort of thing. But I have no desire to use that interface on my entire machine. It's a specific tool good for specific things.
aranelsurion 3y ago
My understanding is that what most people want out of a MacPad is not necessarily the Mac UI on iPad form factor, but Mac capabilities. iPad has a Pro model but iOS doesn't have a Pro edition that lets one use their iPad as a fully capable computing device like any other PC. Basically an iPad that is not just a big iPhone but a capable computer in iPad form factor, not necessarily one that uses MacOS even.
- kvmet 3y ago
  Exactly my feelings. I have an IPad Pro M2. Why shouldn't I be able to run software that works on my M2 MBP? I would even accept having to hook up KB/mouse for input. But carrying around a MacBook AND an iPad is a lot of weight.
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    > Why shouldn't I be able to run software that works on my M2 MBP? Well, there's the technical reason which is that the userland of MacOS and iPadOS aren't the same. But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized.
    - al_borland 3y ago
      >But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized. The iPad Pro is heavily marketed as a device to create things.
      - skydhash 3y ago
        It does, just not the same workflow you use on the mac. I use my iPad Air, for drawing, writing and it's great. But can't imagine having something like Swinsian, Audacity, or Calibre on it without heavily modifying their UIs.
- 3y ago
pazimzadeh 3y ago
I agree with you, but interestingly everything wrong with touch Macs is present in the Vision Pro, and without the benefit of touching glass. Oh wow, I wrote that before even reading the article.
johnwalkr 3y ago
I had a touchscreen laptop in one work environment, and like others, very rarely used the touch interface. It's actually surprisingly tiring to use for more than touching a button or scrolling, and I only use it for that over a mouse if I wasn't at the keyboard (if I was off to the side writing in a notebook or something). I have certainly never missed having the feature. I think this project is cool but it looks like a lot of annoyances compared to just having a macbook plus ipad, and doesn't really seem more portable than a normal macbook plus ipad.
- tomatotomato37 3y ago
  It's surprising how often people advocate for interfaces that require more muscle movement to do the same thing. I regularly use a pen display for drawing, and even with a tool that is more precise than finger touch input and optimized ergonomically for long art sessions I still regularly switch back to a mouse or even laptop touchpad when interacting with anything outside of a purpose-built art program.
Tagbert 3y ago
I no longer have it but for quite a while I used a touch screen Windows laptop. I found touch useful and natural for some actions. I never expected to use it for everything. No worries about gorilla-arm. For me it was about having a mix of interaction methods. Sometimes would use touch, sometimes mouse or trackpad, and sometimes keyboard. It was all very situational. Actions like scrolling, dragging, and tapping buttons lend themselves to touch. Fiddling with forms or small UI elements may need a pointing device. Editing text works best with a keyboard. It's about options. In addition, I felt that being able to switch methods meant less RSI as I wan't using the same movements as much. I was never bothered that some UI elements were too small for touch because I was always ready to switch to a pointer when it was called for. I do the same now on an iPad Pro that almost all the time sits in a keyboard case next to a mouse. I am constantly switching between those and sometimes picking up the pencil, too. it might not be for everyone but I would like the option to do that on Mac OS as well.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  A friend of mine has owned Windows laptops for years. She's constantly trying to do pinch-to-zoom on the screen of my MBP when I'm showing her something. She gets super frustrated at how backwards my computer is. I can see how that feature would be nice to have. But yeah, an entirely touch-first laptop experience would be terrible. At the same time a no-touch laptop experience seems to be suboptimal these days. Philosophical design extremes usually aren't the best.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    I have a Dell with that, wasting power and forcing glossy on me—there was no other option. Hands on keyboard more efficient, so have used it twice in five years maybe. A waste imho.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Dell Inspiron with 4k Screen? I had a work provided one and I kept forgetting it was a touch screen. The screen was nice, but I never found a use for the touch part. A pen (Microsoft Surface laptops) is a better idea. as you can keep the same UI.
MenhirMike 3y ago
I found touch really useful for taking notes (OneNote) and for drawing (Clip Studio Pro) - and that's it. I could try to build some Star Trek-like giant touch UI, but never found it useful to use touch for apps that work better with keyboard/mouse. So yeah, I agree that I wouldn't want a Windows or macOS device that uses touch for the primary UI, I just want touch-enabled apps that make good use of a pen, on a device that has a proper keyboard/trackpad for everything else. Arguably, the Wacom Cintiq already solved that issue completely. I did think that the Surface Studio were the most interesting Surface products, though the price wasn't attractive.
tomrod 3y ago
Just add zoom function so old apps can work somewhat with touch. Works well enough for mobile phones and old.reddit.com.
zozbot234 3y ago
The GNOME built-in apps seem to work just fine in touchscreen mode. Yes the buttons and window titlebar are larger, but not too much. (And there are ongoing 'tweaks' that allow for a better use of the resulting space; e.g. the large, touch-usable titlebar now has a room for a subtitle and a few app-specific buttons.) The clearest issue with GNOME on touchscreens right now is that it ships with a crappy on-screen keyboard, missing many of the PC keys (which leads to usability issues with many apps) and a lot less usable than what you can get on AOSP.
hawski 3y ago
I have a touch enabled Chromebooks and when you change to a tablet mode the interface changes in front of your eyes to be more tablety. It is actually quite nice.
maxsilver 3y ago
I don't think people want to fudge the different interaction styles together. I think they just want to have both experiences out of the same hardware. I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware. It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience. It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!). macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason. There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) Historically, that was basically coping with the fact that mobile devices would ship with low amounts of RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage, so they couldn't really have swap space. One would think that the latter factor is a lot less important nowadays, since storage size and quality has improved with things like UFS.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I thought Apple had the perfect groundwork, at least from UI elements, to make the single device work. My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode. It seemed like Apple was laying a lot of ground work, and it made so much sense to me that they’d do this. This was many, many years ago. I’ve since given up thinking they’ll do this. I thought the same thing about the iPhone, even before the iPad. Once it got fast enough, allow it to plugin to a dock and use a normal desktop with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Some Android devices have since come out that do this, but I think Apple is in a much better position to make something happen.
type0 3y ago
> I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both Many users would be okay with dual booting if they can safe on money and weight
shotnothing 3y ago
Touchscreen is great, touchscreen first UIs are not. I use a touchscreen laptop and the number of times I subconsciously try and tap/scroll/pinch the screen when I use macbooks is frustrating. It is such an improvement over trackpad and a nice compliment to keyboard+mouse

jwells89 3y ago

I’m not sold on the idea of touch on laptops either, particularly since it often comes with compromises that make the display worse at its traditional job — large touch-sensitive screens are typically glossy and have some of the worst antiglare coating I’ve ever encountered, to which the iPad is not exempt (treating glass to be both oleophobic and antiglare must be cost prohibitive beyond smartphone sizes or something), as well as visible touch sensitive wire matrices which is commonly seen on touchscreen PC laptops. I think the idea would be better implemented by a second screen on a swiveling laptop lid. This allows the user to signal to the OS to toggle touch specializations by way of closing or swiveling the lid and lets the main display remain a great no-compromises traditional laptop display.

forgotmypw17 3y ago

I've been using a laptop/tablet with Windows 11 and touchscreen for a while now. It has many problems and is so janky and is really annoying sometimes and it's also so much better than being without it.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

I really think this is the big issue. No disrespect to people who feel differently, but I do not use the touchscreens on laptops for anything substantial. I had one, for years, and I used it probably a handful of times for actual tasks, and the vast majority of the time, it was to like... dismiss a dialog box when I wasn't actually using the machine and was standing over it to where the mouse was out of reach. A mouse is fast, precise, and most importantly, does not block the screen with itself while in use. Your hand is none of those things, and unless you use the screen in the exact same orientation in the exact same place day after day, you'll find it markedly harder to develop muscle memory with regard to it. And, if your software updates, all that could go out the window anyway. A mouse feels like a mouse, barring some hardware change. Once you have your settings dialed in, you know on an instinctual, unconscious level how far it takes to get from here to there. Add to it, even the most basic mouse has two discreet actions- left and right click- out of the box. The shittiest mouse you can find has those two buttons, and these days, probably a third too with the mouse wheel click. A touch is a touch, unless it's a long-press (but don't move your hand by mistake, or it's now a drag) or if you touch with two or more fingers (but that might also mean you want to touch two things? And if you add any lateral movement at all the software will struggle even more.) And all of that happens with zero feedback to the user. Touch screens have a much harder time implementing haptics, and you could use sound but not everyone is going to be comfortable with that. Don't get me wrong, I love my phones and my tablets. But I have no desire at all for touch features on any of my computers, Mac or Windows or Linux. It's just not a good interface for when I need to Get Shit Done.

dr_kiszonka 3y ago
I use a convertible laptop for taking handwritten notes, annotating PDFs, "prototyping" plots, and occasional drawing. I tried navigating the OS using touch, but it is pretty inconvenient and, in my case, not very ergonomic.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Oh yeah, I have a Kindle Scribe my wife got me for my birthday and it's bloody amazing for taking quick notes and making doodles, diagrams, that sort of thing. But I have no desire to use that interface on my entire machine. It's a specific tool good for specific things.

aranelsurion 3y ago

My understanding is that what most people want out of a MacPad is not necessarily the Mac UI on iPad form factor, but Mac capabilities. iPad has a Pro model but iOS doesn't have a Pro edition that lets one use their iPad as a fully capable computing device like any other PC. Basically an iPad that is not just a big iPhone but a capable computer in iPad form factor, not necessarily one that uses MacOS even.

kvmet 3y ago
Exactly my feelings. I have an IPad Pro M2. Why shouldn't I be able to run software that works on my M2 MBP? I would even accept having to hook up KB/mouse for input. But carrying around a MacBook AND an iPad is a lot of weight.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  > Why shouldn't I be able to run software that works on my M2 MBP? Well, there's the technical reason which is that the userland of MacOS and iPadOS aren't the same. But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    >But there's also the ideological reason which is that the iPad is strictly sold as a device for consumption, not creation. They don't want you to run any code on it that they haven't authorized. The iPad Pro is heavily marketed as a device to create things.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      It does, just not the same workflow you use on the mac. I use my iPad Air, for drawing, writing and it's great. But can't imagine having something like Swinsian, Audacity, or Calibre on it without heavily modifying their UIs.
3y ago

pazimzadeh 3y ago

I agree with you, but interestingly everything wrong with touch Macs is present in the Vision Pro, and without the benefit of touching glass. Oh wow, I wrote that before even reading the article.

johnwalkr 3y ago

I had a touchscreen laptop in one work environment, and like others, very rarely used the touch interface. It's actually surprisingly tiring to use for more than touching a button or scrolling, and I only use it for that over a mouse if I wasn't at the keyboard (if I was off to the side writing in a notebook or something). I have certainly never missed having the feature. I think this project is cool but it looks like a lot of annoyances compared to just having a macbook plus ipad, and doesn't really seem more portable than a normal macbook plus ipad.

tomatotomato37 3y ago
It's surprising how often people advocate for interfaces that require more muscle movement to do the same thing. I regularly use a pen display for drawing, and even with a tool that is more precise than finger touch input and optimized ergonomically for long art sessions I still regularly switch back to a mouse or even laptop touchpad when interacting with anything outside of a purpose-built art program.

Tagbert 3y ago

I no longer have it but for quite a while I used a touch screen Windows laptop. I found touch useful and natural for some actions. I never expected to use it for everything. No worries about gorilla-arm. For me it was about having a mix of interaction methods. Sometimes would use touch, sometimes mouse or trackpad, and sometimes keyboard. It was all very situational. Actions like scrolling, dragging, and tapping buttons lend themselves to touch. Fiddling with forms or small UI elements may need a pointing device. Editing text works best with a keyboard. It's about options. In addition, I felt that being able to switch methods meant less RSI as I wan't using the same movements as much. I was never bothered that some UI elements were too small for touch because I was always ready to switch to a pointer when it was called for. I do the same now on an iPad Pro that almost all the time sits in a keyboard case next to a mouse. I am constantly switching between those and sometimes picking up the pencil, too. it might not be for everyone but I would like the option to do that on Mac OS as well.

lamontcg 3y ago
A friend of mine has owned Windows laptops for years. She's constantly trying to do pinch-to-zoom on the screen of my MBP when I'm showing her something. She gets super frustrated at how backwards my computer is. I can see how that feature would be nice to have. But yeah, an entirely touch-first laptop experience would be terrible. At the same time a no-touch laptop experience seems to be suboptimal these days. Philosophical design extremes usually aren't the best.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  I have a Dell with that, wasting power and forcing glossy on me—there was no other option. Hands on keyboard more efficient, so have used it twice in five years maybe. A waste imho.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Dell Inspiron with 4k Screen? I had a work provided one and I kept forgetting it was a touch screen. The screen was nice, but I never found a use for the touch part. A pen (Microsoft Surface laptops) is a better idea. as you can keep the same UI.

MenhirMike 3y ago

I found touch really useful for taking notes (OneNote) and for drawing (Clip Studio Pro) - and that's it. I could try to build some Star Trek-like giant touch UI, but never found it useful to use touch for apps that work better with keyboard/mouse. So yeah, I agree that I wouldn't want a Windows or macOS device that uses touch for the primary UI, I just want touch-enabled apps that make good use of a pen, on a device that has a proper keyboard/trackpad for everything else. Arguably, the Wacom Cintiq already solved that issue completely. I did think that the Surface Studio were the most interesting Surface products, though the price wasn't attractive.

tomrod 3y ago

Just add zoom function so old apps can work somewhat with touch. Works well enough for mobile phones and old.reddit.com.

zozbot234 3y ago

The GNOME built-in apps seem to work just fine in touchscreen mode. Yes the buttons and window titlebar are larger, but not too much. (And there are ongoing 'tweaks' that allow for a better use of the resulting space; e.g. the large, touch-usable titlebar now has a room for a subtitle and a few app-specific buttons.) The clearest issue with GNOME on touchscreens right now is that it ships with a crappy on-screen keyboard, missing many of the PC keys (which leads to usability issues with many apps) and a lot less usable than what you can get on AOSP.

hawski 3y ago

I have a touch enabled Chromebooks and when you change to a tablet mode the interface changes in front of your eyes to be more tablety. It is actually quite nice.

maxsilver 3y ago

I don't think people want to fudge the different interaction styles together. I think they just want to have both experiences out of the same hardware. I carry an M1 MacBook Air, and a iPad Air 5th-gen. They both have identical fanless M1 Apple ARM silicon, both have identical ram (8GB) and identical storage (256gb), it's practically the same device. I even also carry the iPad Magic Keyboard. I have to carry two sets of everything, just because Apple artificially prevents any of their own software from working on any of their own hardware. It makes perfect sense to me that, when in tablet/touchscreen interaction, I get a traditional iPad experience. It makes zero sense, that when I attach the $300 traditional keyboard/trackpad to that iPad Air, I get thrown into a weird iPad-kinda-pretending-to-be-a-laptop-but-failing mode, where you "kinda" have a mouse cursor, and "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) and you can "kinda" resize them, and you can "kinda" have an external display (but despite being huge, you still can't have more than 3 windows!). macOS already works great, "iPad Stage Manager" feels like a bunch of people trying desperately to justify breaking macOS conventions and UI/UX, mostly for no good reason. There's no reason I couldn't be put into normal macOS, and even have my existing iPad apps still running (the software portion of this already works on macOS today, iPad apps run on macOS right now! You just cant experience this on any of the devices that have touchscreens -- you can't do this on the devices that would most benefit from it.)

zozbot234 3y ago
> "kinda" have windows (but only 2 or 3!) Historically, that was basically coping with the fact that mobile devices would ship with low amounts of RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC storage, so they couldn't really have swap space. One would think that the latter factor is a lot less important nowadays, since storage size and quality has improved with things like UFS.
al_borland 3y ago
I thought Apple had the perfect groundwork, at least from UI elements, to make the single device work. My thought was when a keyboard/mouse were connected it would be in macOS mode, with a normal desktop, windows, and the dock. Without these input devices, it would switch to touch mode, forcing all the apps to full screen (or now Stage Manager as an option) and forcing LaunchPad in place is the normal desktop/dock. Developers would be instructed to use larger touch-friendly UI elements for full screen mode, which would be used in the touch mode. It seemed like Apple was laying a lot of ground work, and it made so much sense to me that they’d do this. This was many, many years ago. I’ve since given up thinking they’ll do this. I thought the same thing about the iPhone, even before the iPad. Once it got fast enough, allow it to plugin to a dock and use a normal desktop with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Some Android devices have since come out that do this, but I think Apple is in a much better position to make something happen.

type0 3y ago

> I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both Many users would be okay with dual booting if they can safe on money and weight

shotnothing 3y ago

Touchscreen is great, touchscreen first UIs are not. I use a touchscreen laptop and the number of times I subconsciously try and tap/scroll/pinch the screen when I use macbooks is frustrating. It is such an improvement over trackpad and a nice compliment to keyboard+mouse