I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop. I have owned several laptops with touchscreens, and literally the only thing it's ever done is misclick something when I inadvertently touched my screen. I have a tablet and a phone if I want to tap a screen.

Unrelated: I find it amusing that the screen they showcase looks like a very broken display panel.

The M-series Macbooks have been some of the best machines I've ever used. Why do they seem so intent on ruining that streak?

This is not for me, since I agree with Steve Jobs’s take that it will be painful to use a touchscreen laptop. But I do see it being useful for the touchscreen generation and for artists. The first thing I do on my company provided Windows laptop is to open Device Manager and disable the touchscreen because I don’t want to deal with accidental touch inputs.

Controversial and snarky take:

I think macOS is going to transform more and more into iOS, and not in a good way…losing all the advantages of a keyboard and mouse driven interface. The lowest common denominator with lesser Apple developer effort will win over.

The work on this machine also possibly explains why Apple has not spent any time improving its own Catalyst apps like Reminders, Notes and others on the Mac. These apps ported from iOS do not understand keyboard navigation and rely heavily on the trackpad or mouse. With the introduction of this machine, Apple has no (financial) reason to improve these apps anymore.

Explains why the UX got shittier over the past 1.5 years.

Lots of comments saying the target audience for this is kids and very casual "Insta and Email" users. But they're not releasing it on the Neo or Air. This is, for now, the "proLED" model only. The base model is $2800 and if you max out the options it goes up to $14,000 (though $7,000 of that is storage).

I really don't understand who they think is going to buy this.

Can't believe Apple has finally invented touchscreens on laptops.

I seem to be the only person here who’s glad to see it. I use the touchscreen on my windows machine frequently to scroll, zoom, and freehand draw. When you’re just browsing content it makes it very simple to move around.

If you don’t like it don’t use it - you’re likely not the target audience.

Absolute banger as an X-mass gift to yourself. I'm applying for a loan to afford it.

Touch on Mac OS is pretty cool news. It's not that useful in the current form factor, but hopefuly iPads running MacOS is next on the list of their products (i.e. basically an Apple version of Surface Pro).

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.

I got a touchscreen laptop in 2013 or 2014. It was cool for a couple days, then just annoying when I accidentally clicked on stuff. My new work laptop has a touchscreen and I occasionally use it to scroll. I mostly forget about the touch feature until I'm showing a colleague something and they accidentally click it. Kind of surprising how many people touch laptop screens

I only watched like five minutes of the first video, and I already found it weird for a touch interface to do tap to select and double tap to open. It also seems perfectly natural that single click selects and double click opens. I wonder if I will eventually get used to this, or this is just another way Apple is shoehorning touch on the Mac.

My mother 66 never got comfortable with using computers but loves her iPad.

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.

Have the three videos been modified by AI? They (esp. the second one) look like having voice-overs with lip-sync. Feel very unnatural.

I personally hate touch and can't see myself using it. At the same time, my daughter who is used to Chromebooks, keeps touching the screen on my Macbook. Maybe the target audience is different here.

Nothing I love more than fingerprints on a laptop screen.

Useless feature for laptops unless it’s a flip around convertible or something.

My wife has the first gen Microsoft Surface laptop.

We have, by accident, rediscovered the touch feature multiple times because every time we stop using it and forget it’s there.

Is this why UI elements have gotten bigger and rounder?

Hope they add the option to turn it off.

Get ready for MacOS to turn into iOS ...

Well, this should be interesting...

Yeah, no. I’m not jumping through any hoops to make my apps work on anything I don’t need to until Apple starts treating developers like people.

Oof.

Also, what on earth is that wallpaper?

Plot twist: Apple will regret this decision and fully remove in a year.

i'm a fan of the macbook pro line but this seems really stupid, at least as dumb as the touchbar

I enjoy building apps for macOS in my spare time. Most recently, a little one-off app for making macOS (mostly) usable without reaching for the mouse or trackpad (keyboard-driven).

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.

I can barely stand getting my hands off the keyboard to grab the mouse - lifting them off the keyboard to touch the screen is not something I’d ever use

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

Hacker News hates this - myself included.

That's about as good a sign as we'll get that it'll be a smashing success.

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