A MacBook (Pro) with touchscreen is highly necessary

Will Apple finally tack and we will get a MacBook (Pro) with a touchscreen? It was about time!

Finally a MacBook (Pro) with touchscreen?

There have been rumors about a possible MacBook with a touchscreen for a long time, but never as concrete as now. Bloomberg states that an entire team at Apple is working on this product. That’s unusual, because the company has long been strongly against the idea of ​​a Mac with a touchscreen.

Steve Jobs once said that Apple ran a lot of tests to see if a touchscreen on a Mac was a good idea. The conclusion was then that a touchscreen on a vertical surface such as a monitor is ‘ergonomically terrible’.

The shape of a MacBook has barely changed since then. The laptops are thinner, the screen edges are smaller and unfortunately there are fewer connections. In addition, it is still a computer that you open, after which you place the screen vertically and control everything via the touchpad, keyboard or external mouse. Yet the world around the MacBook has changed.

Touch screens are everywhere

Touchscreens are no longer reserved for a few devices. We have a touchscreen on our wrist, there is one in our car, in the supermarket and maybe even in your fridge. Touchscreens have become the standard for interacting with devices, and MacBooks don’t yet support that standard.

Being able to perform certain actions with your fingers feels so logical. Take a simple action like enlarging an image. Is that easier to do by putting your finger on the touchpad, dragging the arrow on the screen to a corner and then sliding this corner? Or to simply enlarge the image with two fingers as we are used to on our iPhone or iPad?

If you’re in the market for a Chromebook or Windows laptop, there have been good options with touchscreens for years. In fact, once children are used to working with a Chromebook at school, a MacBook without a touchscreen will feel like a step backwards.

It is indeed not the ideal situation ergonomically, but it is also not necessary to suddenly do everything via the touchscreen. It’s about having the option to do certain actions just as quickly. The screen of a MacBook is always within reach.

Touch Bar no success

Apple did try it with the Touch Bar and that didn’t turn out to be a success. The bar at the bottom of the MacBook Pro’s screen allowed you to do a variety of different actions. In the latest MacBook Pros, function keys can be found in that place again.

That does not say anything about the possible success of a touchscreen, because being able to touch something directly on the screen is very different from an extra bar below the screen.

It won’t be on macOS either. In recent years, macOS and iPadOS have grown closer together. So much so that the lack of a touchscreen increasingly feels like a loss and a mistake that Apple does not dare to admit.

Once touchscreens become standard on MacBooks, we’ll wonder how we ever managed without them. We will get used to it very quickly because of the sheer convenience. And if you’re against it, you just can’t use it. Kind of like a U2 album that’s on your device unsolicited: if you ignore it, it won’t bother you.

More about the latest MacBook Pros

The new MacBook Pros that have just been unveiled do not yet have a touchscreen, but they do have fast M2 chips. Read more about the price of the most expensive Apple laptop ever and when the new MacBook Pro will appear.