[HN Gopher] Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Includ...
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Apple Reportedly Working on Touchscreen Macs, Including MacBook Pro
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 11 points
Date : 2023-01-11 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| lampshades wrote:
| Whenever I get off of my iPad, I find myself trying to touch my
| Mac's screen. I used to own a SurfaceBook and for the longest
| time I had muscle memory to just touch the screen.
|
| I agree with Steve Jobs that your arm gets tired if you're using
| it to just scroll webpages. But if you have the odd thing on the
| side on the screen that you can just hit with your thumb, touch
| screens are perfect.
|
| Do I think this is where Apple should focus its time? Probably
| not. My iPad has a Magic Keyboard which I use all of the time.
| It's perfect having a touchscreen. It's small and has apps made
| specifically for touchscreen. Adding a touchscreen to the Mac
| feels like busy work for employees or the company doesn't know
| what to spend money on. Which is unfortunate, because there are
| many things that Apple could be spending money on that are much
| more worth their time.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Steve Jobs, 2010:
|
| "We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it
| doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical.
|
| It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start
| to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants
| to fall off. it doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible.
|
| Touch surfaces want to be horizontal, hence pads.
|
| For a notebook, that's why we're perfected our multitouch
| trackpads over the years, because that's the best way we've found
| to get multitouch into a notebook.
|
| We've also, in essence, put a trackpad -- a multitouch track pad
| on the mouse with our magic mouse. And we've recently come out
| with a pure play trackpad as well for our desktop users.
|
| So this is how were going to use multitouch on our Mac products
| because this (he points at someone touch laptop screen) doesn't
| work."
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-touch-screen-mac-...
| crawsome wrote:
| ...a decade after everyone else already did it. And their
| implementation will be $600 extra than anyone else, and will have
| a class-action lawsuit on the hardware quality before the revised
| model is released 4 years later at extra cost.
| flagstaffaz wrote:
| One thing you have to give apple credit for is (usually) not
| jumping on the bandwagon until they have a compelling solution.
| Pre-release, the iPad was rumored to be a netbook during that
| craze but netbooks died and the iPad is still here. I'm curious
| to see if/how they improve beyond just adding a touchscreen to
| the macbook.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| During the height of the touchscreen ultrabook craze I had a
| "touchscreen MacBook" by setting up my Zenbook as a Hackintosh.
|
| It honestly wasn't that useful past being a party trick: it's
| not very ergonomic to touch a laptop screen unless it folds
| completely like a convertible laptop. A convertible MacBook
| could be interesting, but that's already the niche the iPad Pro
| seems to try to fill despite its OS hangups.
|
| And like the article mentions the OS X UI is not at all
| designed for touch input, touch targets are tiny, lots of
| precise movements to navigate menus, etc.
| qwytw wrote:
| Netbooks turned into chromebooks/ultrabooks though. Back then
| laptops were fat and heavy so in a way the entire market had to
| shift to make netbooks irrelevant.
|
| iPad with an attachable keyboard is pretty close to a netbook
| to be fair (Microsoft even shipped a crippled version of
| Windows specifically for netbooks, of course it was still way
| less "crippled" than iOS/iPad OS is compared to macOS. Maybe
| Apple will fix that with touchscreen support on Mac and finally
| bring then closer to iPads, since that seems to be what
| everyone wants)
| jerojero wrote:
| I've never found touchscreens on laptops useful. In fact, I find
| them a bit annoying because sometimes you touch the screen when
| moving around.
|
| I really don't see the benefit of them unless it's one of those
| laptops that you can turn into tablets. But then, imo, the ideal
| form factor would be closer to 12 inches. Not 13 or 14.
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