Unrelated: I find it amusing that the screen they showcase looks like a very broken display panel.
- it did top the Mac subreddit (700 upvotes) but ranks as the 12th-most popular post in the last month
- it didn't top HN (491 upvotes)
- it didn't top Reddit's main Apple subreddit (1000-1200 upvotes)
I might be remembering wrong but I think this kind of news usually gets thousands of upvotes.
This is how I feel too, but at 49, a Mac user since we bought our 128k, I'm no longer certain I am the market - fairly sure I am not. I have two kids, 10 and 7, and we've had a handful of cheap Chromebook laptops, some with touch and some without, and I can say that my kids always prefer the ones with. I don't get it, objectively it doesn't make sense to me, but it does to them. They would absolutely prefer a touchscreen, even in laptop form factor.
I might change my mind on this later but right now I'm having a hard time seeing it any other way.
And I agree, watching kids swipe feels, to me, like passive consumer induced computer illiteracy.
As long as you can’t fundamentally reprogram the device with your input method, you are at the mercy of other people. (And yeah, sometimes a keyboard is not enough, either.)
I definitely think that a distinct mode is needed though, the inverse of attaching a keyboard to an iPad to make it more desktop-y.
Who uses finger touch on a laptop? I've never actually seen people use it in the wild so I'm just confused where the demand comes from.
An agentic OS, that you can speak to a majority of the time to get stuff done, also seems like an interesting direction
Controversial and snarky take:
I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over.
The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.
Windows has had this in competent form since Windows 10, a full decade ago. It’s fine. It works great. You can even turn it off.
Arguably some Linux desktop environments are even better than Windows for touch screen use.
This phenomenon seems to happen a lot when Apple avoids common technology for a painfully long time.
I really don't understand who they think is going to buy this.
On a side note, I hope this makes Linux distros follow suit with good touchscreen support. On a lot of them Firefox webpages don't even scroll properly on first install.
If you don’t like it don’t use it - you’re likely not the target audience.
She reaches out to touch my MacBook display every so often when I show her stuff.
This is the lowest common denominator that Apple is designing for lately.
But whenever my adult daughter shows my six-year-old grandson something on her Macbook, he immediately tries touching the screen and is confused when it doesn’t respond. He doesn’t have any devices of his own yet, so his defaulting to touch is the result of very occasionally being allowed to use an adult’s smartphone or tablet.
Useless feature for laptops unless it’s a flip around convertible or something.
Doesn’t the $450 iPad debunk that idea completely? Or the $230 Apple Watch? Or the $699 iPhone 17e? The cheapest computers Apple sells have a touch screen.
A computer that survives being banged around on your wrist and swimming underwater has a touchscreen.
Fucking up the UI is not an inevitability. KDE didn’t fuck up the UI, works great on my touch screen. Windows 11 for all its faults handles touch screens very well, as well as non-touch environments.
But I must ask; are you a regular user of macOS? Do you depend on Macs daily? Are you actually invested in that platform as a developer or user?
I switched because didn’t like Liquid Glass, I didn’t like the Photos app redesign for macOS 26, and I liked what Framework was doing. I also wanted more storage and of course that means I was going laptop shopping with the soldered storage of the Mac.
Now I’d say Apple fixed most of their sins for those pain points but I still like Linux better and really like being able to play more games on Steam.
My desktop was a Windows 11 gaming system, and I switched that to Linux due to GPU issues with my AMD card that Linux solved.
My overarching feeling is that all 3 operating systems are relatively competent and that I think none of this touch screen issue is a big deal. macOS isn’t going to go to shit just because it has a touch screen.
I’ve really ended up on Linux because Linux is so good now, not because macOS or Windows are intolerably bad.
We have, by accident, rediscovered the touch feature multiple times because every time we stop using it and forget it’s there.
Also, what on earth is that wallpaper?
That's about as good a sign as we'll get that it'll be a smashing success.
I am no macOS expert, but I already have a handful of questions about how touch input is going to work.
How will hiding/showing hidden menu bars and docks work? What about all the various UI elements that display based on conditionally hovering the mouse? How does one move a window from one space to another via touch input -- hot corners, I guess?
Needless to say, I doubt I am the target audience for this device.
In fact, I do everything I can to avoid having to move my hands off the keyboard - I have a stream deck that touches my keyboard so that I can quickly press a button with my hand barely moving for “advanced” shortcuts that I don’t feel like contorting my hand for, on top of all the usual shortcuts
I wish they’d devote resources to figuring out a better keyboard experience vs this also ran feature that I know for a fact almost no one uses