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.
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
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.
Yes! Thank you. Maybe marketing is trying to normalize that appearance after the Duo-bacle.
Also, what on earth is that wallpaper?
We have, by accident, rediscovered the touch feature multiple times because every time we stop using it and forget it’s there.
Useless feature for laptops unless it’s a flip around convertible or something.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
ChrisMarshallNY•52m ago