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Apple has rejected the idea of ​​creating Macs with touchscreens for more than a decade, but a recent remark by a senior company executive seems to have at least opened the door to the possibility of a change of heart.

Mac and iPad marketing VP Tom Boger recently responded to a question on the topic, initially appearing to stick with the usual line — but adding “I can’t say we never change our mind”…

Touchscreen Mac rejection by Steve Jobs

We know from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ 2010 remarks that Apple has been testing touchscreen Macs since at least 2008, and possibly much earlier.

At the time, he said Apple had “thought about this years ago” and done a lot of user testing. It was those tests, he said, that led the company to reject the idea.

Turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives a great demonstration but after a short period of time you start to get tired and after a long period of time your hand wants to fall off.

It doesn’t work. Ergonomically it’s terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal.

Apple has stuck to that line ever since

Apple has continued to stick to that line ever since. In 2020, for example, there were renewed rumors that UI changes introduced in macOS Big Sur hinted at plans for a touchscreen Mac. Craig Federighi said no.

“I have to tell you, when we launched Big Sur and these articles started coming out saying, ‘Oh my God, look, Apple is getting ready for touch.’ I was like, ‘Wow, why?’

“We designed and developed the look and feel of macOS in a way that felt most comfortable and natural to us, without even thinking about touch.

Fast forward to this week and it’s Apple still saying the same thing. Boger may leave the door slightly ajar with his latest comment, but what he said before was still clear enough:

The iPad, he said, “has always been a touch-first device,” while the Mac is about “indirect manipulation” — aka using a keyboard, mouse and/or trackpad […] He remained firm: iPads are touch, Macs are not. “MacOS is about a very different paradigm of computing,” he said.

Effectively we have long been able to test this

While none of us have been inside Apple’s test labs to try out any of the prototypes, I they have uses third-party mods to add touchscreen functionality.

One of them was for an early Macintosh and the other for the 13-inch MacBook Air. Both take the form of a monitor environment with infrared LEDs to detect finger position and movement, and then a utility that makes the Mac see this as mouse movement. My hand really wanted to fall off either way.

But you don’t really need to have had that experience to see how well (or not) a touchscreen Mac will work. If you’ve ever used an iPad with a Magic Keyboard, then you can now copy the best possible case for touch screen Macs.

That’s because you have the keyboard and trackpad as your primary input devices, but you can also use the iPad’s touchscreen directly—with a touch-first user interface that means we don’t even have to get into the impact of the operating system.

So…using the iPad as a pseudo-MacBook like this, how much use do you make of the iPad’s touchscreen?

My answer is “not enough to justify it”

I won’t pretend never I use the touchscreen when I use my iPad that way (although I have to use mostly past tense for this).

One thing I’ve done from time to time is use the touch screen to scroll quickly. If I want to scroll normally to the next screen, then I use the trackpad. But if I want to quickly scroll a long far down a very long document, then scrolling it with your finger is faster.

(I also use touch for Split View and Slide Over – but that’s entirely because the UI for each is terrible, and touch is the only way around that, so we can ignore it when discussing touchscreen Macs.)

And to the best of my recollection, it is.

So to me, there’s no way the incredibly random use of a touchscreen in MacBook-stand-in mode can justify the extra expense of adding one to an actual MacBook.

Perhaps creating one is the only way for this idea to die

I’ve said before that I don’t mind Apple including one in the lineup – just don’t make me pay for it and mess with the macOS UI to accommodate it.

Be sure to offer one or more models to please those who want a touchscreen Mac. But don’t make them the standard, and for the love of all that is holy, keep the iPadOS UI team far, far away from my Mac!

My very strong suspicion is that it won’t sell well enough for Apple to keep it in the lineup. But hey, maybe that’s the only way this idea can finally die: build one, see how many are willing to pay the premium, and—most importantly—see how many of them would ever buy another one after actually using it.

Photo from Microsoft Edge on Unsplash