Why do you want to touch your Mac screen so badly?

It’s that time in the tech debate cycle when we’re once again talking about how Apple should start making Macs with touch-enabled displays. I remember back in 2020 how so many people were certain touchscreen Macs were just round the corner, because they put together these two pieces of ‘evidence’:

The revamped UI in Mac OS Big Sur featured an unusually wider space between various UI elements, suggesting Apple was prepping the UI to accept touch input by offering more touch-friendly targets.

The fact that the new Macs built on Apple Silicon are capable of running iPhone and iPad apps natively.

It’s early 2023 and Macs with touch-enabled displays are still nowhere to be seen. But there seems to be an increasing number of tech people who just can’t wait for Macs to come with a touch display. And I’m genuinely curious to know what kind of insurmountable problems a Mac with a touch display could solve for them. I’ve given this a lot of thought; I’ve tried to ask myself what I could do better with a touchscreen Mac than what I’m currently doing. I couldn’t find any compelling answer.

But I have a theory as to why the idea of a touchscreen Mac makes me shrug — I’m a longtime Mac user; I’m someone whose time spent on Apple devices is 80% Mac, 15% iPad, 5% iPhone. The efficiency and, let’s call it ‘interaction performance’ I have developed over decades by using Mac desktops and laptops with their intended input methods — keyboard, mouse, trackpad — will hardly be improved by also having touch input on a Mac display. I’ll always be quicker with mouse and keyboard. Even most trackpad gestures that are already available on Mac laptops feel slow and awkward. Swipe up/down with three fingers to reveal all app windows or to put the Desktop in the foreground, are gestures I’ve never really learnt because I can just hit F10 or F11 to do the same, without even moving my fingers away from the keyboard. Thus, a traditional Mac laptop with a touch display wouldn’t bring me any real advantage or usefulness.

To get back to my theory: the people who’d love to have a touchscreen Mac are people who prefer having the iPad and iPhone as primary devices for work and leisure. It’s the iPad-first guys who on the one hand are frustrated by the still mediocre multitasking and still limited functionality Apple is providing on the iPad, and on the other hand realise the sheer versatility and multitasking dexterity the Mac still has in spades despite the general worsening of Mac OS over the past few years. In short, they say they’d love a touchscreen Mac, but what they mean is that they’d love a hybrid iPad/Mac device that could offer the best of both worlds.

And you know what? I think Apple should make that device. Not a touchscreen Mac, but a Surface-like 2‑in‑1 device running Mac OS with an added ‘tablet mode’ that would adjust Mac OS’s UI to be operated by touch when you’re running Mac-only apps. And when you’re running an iOS/iPadOS app, well, there wouldn’t be any issues as the app would behave exactly like on iOS/iPadOS.

I also think that this device should replace the iPad Pro entirely. Because this device would effectively be the best iPad Pro you can imagine. This iPad/Mac convertible would make everyone happy and I don’t think it would really cannibalise sales of regular iPads and regular Macs. Mac-first people (like me) would keep enjoying and purchasing Macs. People who only need an iPad for basic tasks and consumption would continue to enjoy the regular iPad, an iPad Air, or an iPad mini, and people with ‘hybrid’ needs would have exactly the device they want, just like Surface Pro users on Windows.

By the way, as a Surface Pro user myself, I can say that the appeal of such a device isn’t that you can touch the screen all the time you want. When I’m using it in laptop mode, with the Surface Type Keyboard and integrated trackpad, or even with a separate mouse, I basically never touch the screen. The appeal is that, in more mobile and less stable situations, I can detach the keyboard (or wrap it on the back of the Surface), take out the Surface Pen or equivalent stylus if needed, and the device becomes a full-blown tablet. In other words, the appeal is the device’s ability to adapt and transform while retaining its usability and usefulness. A traditional Mac laptop with the touch-enabled display feature bolted on would indeed be a terrible laptop, with yet another layer of interaction plastered on top of what Mac OS already offers. But the Apple equivalent of Microsoft’s Surface Pro? That would make much more sense, in my opinion. At this point, it’s the only way I can see for Apple to produce a truly ’Pro’ device in tablet form.