Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.
We saw the same thing happen with mobile first on websites.
Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.
So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.
Would it change anyhthing? No. Because developers of the programs what are not part of Windows aren't keen on keeping "the same efficiency". Audacity 4, Thunderbird are good examples of a bad interface - and they did it disregarding the OS UI.
However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.
Aero -> Liquid Glass
Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications
Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS
Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades
Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro
I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.
This isn’t an unimplemented theory. You can head over to Best Buy right now and see what it’s like to use a touch screen laptop.
I feel like all this debate is taking place in an odd vacuum where a lot of us are talking about a bunch of potential problems with having a touch screen on a computer and all these problems are already resolved.
Maybe it’s similar to the whole iPhone duo thing where Apple users are just discovering all the caveats of a foldable phone, but we’ve already gone over all of it with competitors.
what i've learning developing and creating products over the years is that harmless features tend to be the ones that cause the most problems. for ex, now you have to add touchscreen code to the OS vs previously not having it at all. and this code or feature we will support for the rest of the lifetime of that product.
In the case of touch screens, it hasn't caused a lasting problem in Windows or Linux.
1. Takes extra battery 2. I’m not touching my screen regardless. It gets dirty enough
My last three or four laptops, which never even booted Windows, have had disabled touchscreens
Basically a product for the people currently carrying around a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro.
Just touch on a laptop screen makes no sense. I’ve never felt the need to do this.
The marketing material shows a person playing a virtual piano with their fingers..
Buttons sized to be hit by your physical thumb and buttons sized to be hit by a tiny high-precision cursor are very different things.
I am sitting on a macbook pro with the vertical tab pane open in chrome, with 12 tabs. The outer joint of my thumb covers the entire list, in both width and height. A touch-friendly version of that would be humongous in comparison.
The end result will be akin to taking keyboards away from Platinum league top tier Korean pro RTS players. 500+ operations per minute down to 10
That just hasn’t happened with Windows touch screens.
Yes, Microsoft did fuck around and find out with Windows 8, but by the time Windows 10 landed an entire decade ago, this whole issue has been completely settled. That’s right, your Windows/Linux user friends have been using touchscreens (or no touch screens) without issue for a decade. No UX sky has fallen in this regard.
There’s absolutely zero downside to having a touch screen on Windows and you also absolutely don’t need a touch screen to use it.
I’m using a touch screen on my Linux laptop right now and it’s great. I don’t have to use it. The screen being touch didn’t cost me extra money. It’s just there if I want it.
The Apple camp seems to believe that every technology included with a product must have some kind of intentional holistic value. Apple removed the USB-A port because USB-C is the future. Apple removed the escape key and the function keys because the Touch Bar would replace it.
But the truth of the matter is, sometimes the option to just include both isn’t some kind of magical barrier that Apple can’t do.
You go out and buy a ThinkPad X9 15p and it has 3x thunderbolt, HDMI, SD card, and USB-A. Why doesn’t a MacBook Pro include USB-A? Well, remember, USB-A is the past! It’s legacy!
But the thing about it being unnecessary doesn’t change the fact that it remains trivially expensive to include, and it comes in handy for a bunch of peripherals that aren’t even that old.
So, I think this is why everyone assumes that Apple is going to destroy the OS because of some new thing they add to the hardware. Because the Apple cult is all about the mythical finely crafted experience. If you don’t do things the Apple way you’re holding it wrong. but in Microsoft/Linux-land, they don’t really care. Linux is fully free, and Microsoft knows their demographic net is too wide and their marketshare is too high that they can’t dictate form factor, choice of peripherals, etc. Their whole philosophy is that Windows is suitable for anything and everything.
The Apple culture can’t contemplate a technology company just including an extra option for users with no specific intended use case. PC manufacturers include a touch screen because, screw it, it only costs a few cents extra and maybe someone might like it, software integration be damned/that’s not our problem.
Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.
We forget this because Windows 7 was ugly and Windows 10 and 11 are nicer looking and that feels like progress, somehow. But you don't get nearly the functional information density with Windows 11 that you did with 7.
The taskbar icons are the exact same size. The tray icons are the exact same size. I’m struggling to figure out what’s different.
I personally use KDE which you can fully customize in terms of sizing, it’s great on a touch screen.
Windows laptops never expected tough screen adoption to hit 90% and still touch degraded the experience.
The worry here is that with Apple's e2e design control over the Mac, that this pivot will mean our MacOS UX will be removed in lieu of a more iPad-like experience.
Just look at other developer-friendly features like unlocked bootloaders, background jobs, unsigned software that Apple has removed from their hardware .
So this is a big deal and significant. It's different than you running Linux on your Windows laptop because the touch experience there never had a chance to push out the traditional UX.
What Microsoft introduced touch surfaces, they came out of the train wreck of Longhorn and they were under the belief that they could push windows down to phones. Reality was that they pushed touch surfaces in a barbell distribution… ultra high end and ultra low end. Mostly low end as screen costs were super high.
With Apple, look at the pencil and the iPad. They’ve had a lot of fits and starts, but the Apple Pencil didn’t fundamentally change the iPad, but it did open the door for a very high value use cases for things like procreate.
I mean the entry level price for this is $2,899, "only" $400 more than the comparable non-touch MBP.