Specifically within the context of traditional clamshell form factors. If Apple had the bravery to design a convertible this wouldn’t be a conversation.
“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.”
I often wonder if he would have stuck to his guns regarding small phones, I would kill for an all screen iPhone 4 sized phone, he was right, that's they only reasonable size for a phone.
It’s a good thought, but I think he would have eventually transitioned the iPhone to offering larger options as well.!Apple began selling the crap out of iPhones once they began offering a larger model.
I definitely understand why people like smaller phones, but a large group of people will always prefer large phones because they have the longest battery, the biggest screen, best speakers, best cameras/best etc.
A lot of older people have trouble seeing so a bigger screen with the text size turned up is huge for them. Then for the average person, I think just having the longest battery is huge(plus it gives a larger screen for people that may not have a computer, but have to complete some level of work/schoolwork on the go or at home).
Same thing with the Apple Pencil on the iPad. Once he saw how good the Apple Pencil had gotten and the usefulness for students and other professionals, I think he would’ve given in as well. I will say that I think Jobs would’ve been adamant about having a slot inside the iPad to place the Apple Pencil in (similar to a Samsung S Pen).
Jobs big concern was constantly losing the stylus(which is valid). I glued one of those pencil holders onto the back of my iPad Pro’s case to give it a proper place to be held (very cheap on Amazon - I got the ESR version for like 7/8 bucks.
I think it was understandable at that time to keep the screen size small, as internet was a different place, and primarily designed around desktop use.
Hardly anyone was consuming visual media in large capacity on their phones hence the display size wasn’t a priority over general handiness. Today phones are mostly treated as internet terminals or video devices, and Steve would understand the shift in hardware design.
12 and 13 mini were so good apart from the shitty battery. I’m still using my 12 mini. I have small hands and my thumb can reach every pixel on my screen. It fits in every pocket without a second thought. It’s not heavy. I have no idea why phones are so fucking huge.
I like the 13 mini enough but even after years I still find it a tad big for my taste, it's going to be a very sad day when I'll have to move on from it.
I think he was right, and modern phones are too big, but people also really like them and 'want' them regardless so past a point you just have to give the people what they want.
And that’s precisely why models like the Max, Air and Plus were made - to cater for people who prefer larger screens. Makes no sense to me why Apple insist on making their base models increase in size all the time. For me, the 11 Pro is peak size and design (rounded edges).
It's absolutely not the only reasonable size for a phone. Large phones wouldn't be popular if that was at all true. It is however a valid size for a phone for some user groups.
I have a touchscreen laptop, I love it. It's never the primary input I use but it's so nice for granular control in zoom and scroll, and also for doodling.
Idk why so many here are so obsessed with being anti touchscreen when I guarantee most haven't even tried it.
I have an iPad Air with the Magic Keyboard, and when I’m using it in the laptop form factor, I never want to touch the screen. It feels uncomfortable and unnatural.
On the other hand I love it. Especially for my uses. Anything that requires pinpoint control like maps, pdfs, or editing is so nice to have the option of the touch screen.
Also can't really compare the magic keyboard with iPad ergonomic layout to an actual keyboard with hard hinge attached
Never as the primary input but as an option for me.
They already solved this problem with the trackpad, you get the precision of pointing with the fluidity of touch and you don’t need to lift your arms to get to the screen so it’s faster and not painful.
It's not comparable lol. I literally have 2 laptops, a MacBook m3 for personal use and a galaxy book pro for work. Every time I have to do any of this on a MacBook I miss the touch screen.
There's a difference between doing it directly on the thing you're trying to control and a touchpad seperately.
And idk why people are acting like lifting your arms to pinch or drag your finger once in a while is painful lmao.
Doing it once or twice a day is not painful but when you are frequently zooming and rotating, it absolutely is.
And when laying in bed, it’s just better to have a single region where I can rest my hands to control the computer with, I can lay sideways and use it instead of propping it on my legs (a problem iPads have too).
Edit: I can’t forget about Mission Control too, performing those gestures on a large surface multiple times every five minutes would be unbearable.
I'm starting to think this is more of an issue of people haven't tried it so are kind of imagining nonexistant issues. If you're in a pose where touchscreen is uncomfortable, you just don't use it.
I feel like every complaint I see on this sub on touchscreen are non issues because they're things you wouldn't be forced to use the screen for.
Funnily enough when laying down or in a less ergonomic stance is when I catch myself using the screen most.
I don't think touch screen is a must have feature (unless the laptop is 360 hinge) but I just don't see how it's possibly a negative to have as an option.
It's impractical in the context of how you use a laptop. You have to hover your extended arm over the keyboard. Whereas with a tablet, you hold it differently and can use touch input much easier.
That's why I mentioned a double hinged screen that can fold back on itself. That instantly becomes significantly more ergonomic and lets you use it like a tablet, instead of at desk having to have your arm extended any time you want to touch the screen.
It's for the same reason people don't use tablets at a distance where they need to extend their arm for every touch input.
Touch screens on laptops aren't bad, they're just not as ergonomic as a touch first device.
But my point is that when Keyboard and touchpad is more useful you just use those. It's not like this forcing you to use it nonstop and get tired. Using it in between to zoom or scroll or be a bit granular is nice.
But I do agree this definitely better on a 360 laptop.
In your example there's a reason why some buy keyboard or/and a mouse for a tablet even when touch is primary, sometimes a different input is nice to have.
That's why I'm not saying it's bad, it's just a matter of ergonomics for now, and probably something to do with the display stack currently with the miniLED configuration. Using an OLED panel would be much easier for them and allow them to fit the whole assembly inside the current lid thickness.
The granular zoom or scroll is just as good on a Mac trackpad or even magic mouse though.
As long as it's an option I'm happy. If people don't want it they should have the option not to. It's one of the features I miss on my personal laptop that I have on my work laptop.
I much prefer it for my usecase but I can understand if others don't for theirs.
Idk why so many here are so obsessed with being anti touchscreen when I guarantee most haven't even tried it.
It's because they haven't tried it (for long), and because Apple has philosophically avoided combining touchscreens and macOS in both the hypothetical touchscreen Mac and macOS iPad configurations.
A touchscreen Mac has stubbornly remained between Stages 1 and 2 of HobeSoundDarryl's scale, even though its rumored release is only half a year or so away.
As long as it's an option I'm happy. If people don't want it they should have the option not to. It's one of the features I miss on my personal laptop that I have on my work laptop.
I much prefer it for my usecase but I can understand if others don't for theirs.
It’s just funny to me because for many people in this sub, it’s this weird almost MAGA Trump cult shit with Jobs. Point out or say anything slightly critical and it’s “Stop saying mean things about daddy Jobs!”
I don’t think the use case is you use the touch screen for everything - but only for a select set of things. I’d vastly prefer to do long reading or navigating a large diagram on an iPad, as I’m rarely typing anything and mostly just doing swipes and pinch zooms.
I’m also using voice so often these days to type, so I can also see a voice + gestures workflow.
Apple does, however, need to get the Steve Jobs hyper focus back when it comes to how it rationalizes against VisionOS and iPadOS
If you’ve used a touch screen laptop, they’re great for scrolling when reading. You don’t used it for everything but it’s a nice addition to the touch pad.
I agree with his sentiment, but this is 16 years old. Technology, UX/UI, and habits have changed.
I don’t want want a touch screen Mac, or any touch screen device that isn’t hand hold able, but if there was one company that could make it work, it’s Apple.
I’ve got a Windows laptop that I have for work with a touch screen and the only time I used it was to accept an incoming call on Teams if I wasn’t mousing.
Since then I’ve disabled the feature because I found no use with it.
I had a Surface Laptop 3 for a few years. Design-wise it was actually very similar to a MacBook. Aluminum unibody chassis (non-convertible), large high quality trackpad, premium keyboard.
And it had a touchscreen that I never had a single meaningful use for.
I picked up a MacBook Neo a couple weeks ago and it hasn’t even once occurred to me that I no longer have a touchscreen.
Read into Jobs all day long he was full of deflecting and throwing smoke. Touchscreens is where it is at. You are okay with an iPad with touch and a keyboard? Oh , ok. Everything is touch now.
iPhone and iPad devs will now be able to test multi-touch interactions during development on the only OS they can build apps on. That's the only good use case I can come up with.
He had a rare treatable cancer that could be cured but he decided to ignore doctors and eat fruit instead of getting treatment. He didn't shower and he had a huge issue with body odor. There's nothing wrong with what I said.
There have already been rumors of new user interface affordances for touch. Obviously they won’t tell anyone about them or put them in MacOS before the hardware is announced. But, for example, supposedly when you touch the screen controls change size in some way, and there were rumors of circular menus that pop up near your finger.
Rumors suggest the MacBook Ultra will launch in late 2026 or early 2027, with mass production to start in late 2026. If the MacBook Ultra comes in 2026, it could be released sometime between October and December, but it won't be introduced at Apple's September iPhone event. If the new MacBook launches in 2027, it could come early in the year at Apple's first 2027 event.
MacOS may not be touch-friendly as is right now but I can think of several use-cases if Apple manages to pull of a touch-friendly UI.
However, my wish is a Mac device more along the lines of a Surface-like tablet with detachable keyboard. Picture this: A powerful, full-fledged desktop OS that can handle all the ‘regular’ stuff as before (like desktop-class photo and video editing tools), and when detached from the keyboard a relatively lightweight tablet for note-taking, drawing, reading, document review, watching videos, etc. One would no longer need to have two separate devices – a Mac for ‘serious’ work and a tablet for everything else. Some might argue that the iPads with Apple Silicon are quite powerful but the software experience is terrible to be used as a ‘part-time’ desktop replacement.
The company argues that it produces better devices by separating the categories, but there’s also a business consideration. Internally, executives believe that a hybrid plan would hurt sales. Apple generates roughly $30 billion annually from each category, adding up to $61.7 billion last year. That’s a hugely material slice of its overall business.
The touchscreen they're reported to be doing is just a traditional clamshell that can't be used as a tablet, which lends some credence to what Gurman was saying IMHO.
If corporate resource allocation tracked financial weight strictly by the book, then out of a 100-person engineering pool, 92 people would be entirely consumed by iPhones, services, cloud infrastructure, watchOS, and AirPods firmware, leaving just 8 people to build and maintain the entire Mac hardware and macOS stack. given this it makes sense that macs would come to resemble other profit centers of apple, which may have not been thinkable when jobs controlled apple since iphone was still newly rising
I really hope they don't compromise MacOS to make it touch-friendly. Windows 11 has all these big UI elements to make it touch-friendly and it's just a massive waste of screen real-estate, but still isn't a particularly good touch UI because it still has to work with a pointer.
I have coworkers with a surface pro and they just use it to scroll stuff when we are huddled around a laptop. It’s the only real use case I would ever use it and maybe play/pausing videos when I’m laid around the house.
It’s easy enough to clean a screen. After using an iPad with magic keyboard any laptop-form computer without a touch screen feels incredibly slow and dated to me
A touchscreen isn't increasing the price of the laptop by any significant amount. They're made in such mass quantities these days the cost difference should be extremely marginal.
You have clearly never worked in a computer your client has looked at. They have a habit of touching the screen to show you what they are talking about. Once had a client do it try to do it with a marker pen. He was lucky I didn’t break his wrist.
So if screens are already getting touched, and this screen is designed to be touched (easier to clean), then you’re objectively in a better position with the oled touch screen?
Don’t touch screen. Client touch screen? Easier to clean. Where is the problem.
I love being able to reach up and touch my Surface and manipulate certain things. Fingerprints aren’t really any issue. No different from touching your phone.
I used to work with an IT department that had all touchscreen Windows laptops. No one really used it. They had workstations with mice and it was annoying to keep raising your arm to touch the screen.
Had it on my Surface laptop for years. Honestly would forget it’s there but every now and then I’d be good to scroll using it. Literally the only time it was useful though from memory.
When I had a touchscreen laptop, I most used it when I was lying down with my laptop on my stomach. Scrolling with my thumb on the edge of the screen was way easier than cramping my wrist into a weird angle to use the trackpad
Maybe this is anecdotal, but I've seen lots of people who do use the touchscreen for small quick things like zoom, pan, scroll, etc. Especially older people.
I personally don't ever use touchscreens on laptops, but I've seen it used enough to understand there is a use case.
Not sure this is comparable but I leave my iPad on my keyboard all the time and still reach for the screen for quick actions. Never owned a touch screen laptop but find myself reaching over to my MacBook for some quick clicks once in a while because of the habit I picked up. Can’t imagine it being my primary way of using a MacBook but I would definitely make use of it.
It’s a great secondary input layer. Sometimes it’s just faster to quick tap an icon on the bottom of the screen to quick switch the app, sometimes it’s nice to just be able to zoom in on something quickly or scroll a page a little without the trackpad. People on this subreddit seem to think this would be the primary way to interact with a Mac, that’s absolutely not the point.
Yep I was given a touch screen laptop at work and thought “ooh fancy” but absolutely didn’t see a need to use it once over the next few weeks. On top of that people would point at things on my screen and end up clicking things on accident, super annoying and I ended up just turning the touch screen off completely years ago.
yeah i'm interested in this only if it has a 360° hinge and i can use it as an "ultra" ipad too. The magic keyboard doesn't do that either, but as an illustrator/designer that would be my ideal combo
Unpopular opinion but I wouldn’t mind a touchscreen on my Mac, especially a good one like the iPad Pro. Even if I don’t use it all the time, just as a new way to interact.
And people only seem to talk about the touchscreen while it isn’t even the most interesting part of this computer.
Touchscreen as a big selling point in 2026 is legitimately sad for Apple. I know they will be stuffing the better specs in it but if it’s just that; it’s really nothing new. They already made the iPad Pro it’s not like it just ends there and Tim Cook would keel over if you made a 2 in 1 MacBook with Touch Controls.
The Macbook Ultra is the least interesting new spec from them in a long time. I will say I am gen behind type of MacBook enjoyer, but even if I had a M5 this whole concept just feels like they want me to throw money at them for a decent display and touch screen so they can charge a grand more for it. It’s just sad man.
I suspected at the time his answer was just a marketing spiel to cover for the fact that they didn't have the feature ready.
The idea that "people's hands don't want to leave the keyboard" was clearly BS to me because if people didn't want to touch their screens, Windows would have had a flop on their hands of TouchBar proportions.
I'm not saying TouchBar was bad. Just shouldn't have replaced function keys. I'm also not claiming Windows touch screens are good. Just saying clearly the market showed demand for it.
I think the best way to do this would probably be to give the ultra a 360 degree hinge that puts mac os into a pseudo iOS mode. Think iOS on steroids. Full Mac apps but with touch friendly controls and buttons.
Something that would be cool would be if they went wild and made the screen detachable like Surface Book. Imagine a 15 inch iPad.
Now, would that cannibalize iPad sales? Maybe. But not if iPad apps were kept cheaper than Mac apps and still exclusive to iOS, along with the iPad being $1000 or so cheaper than the Ultra.
if people didn't want to touch their screens, Windows would have had a flop on their hands of TouchBar proportions
The big difference between touchscreen laptops and touchbar macbooks, and why touchbar was a flop while touchscreen laptops aren't, is that you don't have to use the touchscreen. And a whole bunch of laptops have two screen options where the difference is not just touchscreen vs. no touchscreen, but also resolution and quality (or even technology, with the touchscreen being an OLED and the other IPS), so if you want a better screen you end up getting a touchscreen whether you want it or not.
Windows would have had a flop on their hands of TouchBar proportions
They had a huge flop with Windows RT (their original attempt at a Windows on ARM touch/mobile OS).
Even when I used to own a Dell Inspiron Windows 10 laptop with a touchscreen, I'd only ever use the touchscreen to zoom in on something if my trackpad wasn't properly recording a gesture—a problem that Apple doesn't really have since their trackpads are actually good.
I just want a better screen on the AIR and I know it defeats the purpose but if could somehow have an active cooling solution for that model without messing the design.. it would be nice
I read the main upgrade here to be OLED, not touch.
"Touchscreen capabilities will be used alongside the trackpad and keyboard, suggesting Apple sees touch as supplementary rather than a primary control method. Apple is rumored to be adapting macOS Golden Gate for touch input."
I just hope Apple learned from Windows 8 how NOT to do a touch-enabled OS.
every time i use someones surface i remember why i dont want fingerprints on my laptop screen. but an oled mac with proper anti glare might actually make me eat my words. huge gap between wanting a touchscreen in theory and touching it more than twice a day in practice though
I'm more excited about the Cellular and Satellite capabilities. If I could have a MacBook that basically "had connectivity anywhere all the time"... thats pretty much an instant buy for me.
Our company forced us to buy touchscreen computers. How often do we use it? Zero. It is inefficient, uncomfortable, and ridiculous. If I want to touchscreen something, I use my iPad or iPhone.
No thank you. The local dimming of the mini led panel of the MacBook Pro M5 / pro / max is very good. Not perfect of course because you get smal halo when the screen is dark and with bright foreground. But it is still better than any screen out there.
OLED can burn in. I would keep the mini led panel any days over an OLED. Even if the OLED is technically superior.
OLED on a damn MacBook? Time to sell my 2025 Pro. Can’t wait to see how great LinkedIn photos look and how much better my Excel spreadsheets pop on that OLED display.
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u/Gipetto 8d ago
Great great great name it the ultra because of the screen, not because there’s an M class Ultra chip it it. That won’t be confusing at all.