While Windows users have flaunted their devices in all shapes and sizes, Apple still sticks to the MacBook, iPad format. There’s still no touch screen MacBook, but we now have an iPad with a keyboard. Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, talked to the Wall Street Journal about why there’s no touchscreen Mac.
Ternus says that “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad. It’s optimized for that. The Mac is optimized for indirect input. We haven’t felt a reason to change that.” It is for this simple reason that we may never get a touch screen MacBook. The slimmest possibility for one is only if iPads are discontinued for some reason. Seeing how close the iPad Pro is to a MacBook, that’s not a possibility either.
Why No Face ID On Mac?
This year’s MacBook Pros got a notch, which has top-notch issues of its own. However, Apple didn’t add Face ID despite the notch. Apple’s vice president of iPad and Mac product marketing, Tom Boger, says it is so because “Touch ID is more convenient on a laptop since your hands are already on the keyboard.”
Another reason we think Touch ID is better is that Apple offers it in Magic Keyboards separately. If you want to connect your MacBook to an external display and work with the screen down, you can still unlock your setup. With Face ID, you’ll have to raise the lid every time you want to unlock your Mac.
Do We Need A Touch Screen Mac?
I switched from Mac to PC for about a month. It was a touch screen HP laptop, and I couldn’t wonder but miss a good quality trackpad. It is simply inconvenient to raise your hand from the keyboard, scroll using the touchscreen, and bring it back to the keyboard to type. While it proved amazing for multimedia consumption, it was nothing extraordinary over a Mac.
So unless your workflow includes a ton of reading and scrolling, a touch screen makes sense with minimum keyboard use. If this is the case, an iPad is hands down a better device. For any other scenario, a good trackpad should suffice.
That said, do you still think there should be a touch screen MacBook for 2022? Should Apple at least offer a MacBook-iPad hybrid as an experiment? Let us know in the comments.
