https://support.apple.com/en-us/111883

Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!

No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.

Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.

But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.

I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.

I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.

Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.

It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.

No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!

My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.

Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.

Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.

As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.

Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)

Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.

Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).

Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.

It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.

However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed

Maybe this is the reason they doing it now

A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.

I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).

A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...

Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.

I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.

But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.

I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).

Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.

All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.

> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”

> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.

I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...

"""

Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?

I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.

Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.

But that's just me, I'm a simple guy, like and subscribe!

"""

When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.

While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.

If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.

I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.

The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.

I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.

There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:

iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.

That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.

Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.

Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.

Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.

- Steve Jobs

Apple: check our new vertical touchscreen!

Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly

It's a nonissue when you look at the state of macOS attention to detail nowadays, regardless of which side of the fence you're on.

probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.

But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..

For an M5 max top bin with 128GB Ram:

- mac studio: $5,899.00 (with 2TB ssd bump to match the default macbook sku)

- macbook 16: $7,399.00

Portability gets a hit but I feel you can have a thin client and let the studio do the heavy lifting back at your home/studio(heh).

Meanwhile they just added a touchscreen. No new hinge. No new UI. Not even a Pen support.

WTF are they doing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZI5uUSdEo

It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.

Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.

If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.

2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.

Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.

Windows laptop took the same path, for the better.

Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.

Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.

I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.

Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.

Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.

I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.

I was gonna get it for the oled (also don’t care about touch screen) but now it’s also for the glowing logo!

IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.

$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.

So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.

Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.

And look at all those glorious ports

> Draw. Sketch and annotate directly onscreen.

You'd think Apple would understand the form factor.

We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.

And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.

Huawei made a Fold laptop that seems to be running Linux already if you're into that.

This is so bizarre. I'll never understand Apple fans.