Does Apple have a touch screen laptop

MacBooks havent had the best time of it recently, what with the terrible butterfly keyboards vastly outstaying their welcome. But things are on the up lately, especially with the new Apple Silicon M1 chips debuting in the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

But one thing MacBooks have totally disregarded over the past several years is the touchscreen. While rival laptop makers scrambled to add touch control to their own machines, Apple has reaffirmed that it doesnt intend to do so. Which is a very good thing.

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While its always looking like Apple is on the verge of merging one or more of its product lines, it seems there are some lines that it wont cross. Despite the fact the M1 chip in the new Macs is based on the A series found in iPads and iPhones, theres no chance of a touchscreen MacBook anytime soon.

This news was confirmed by Craig Federighi, Apples senior vice president of software engineering when speaking to The Independent. I gotta tell you when we released Big Sur, and these articles started coming out saying, Oh my God, look, Apple is preparing for touch. I was thinking like, Whoa, why? We had designed and evolved the look for macOS in a way that felt most comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch.

According to Federighi the familiarity is the strength of Apples line-up, since users can swap between devices with less cognitive load to the switching process and not some signaling of a future change in input methods.

Basically touchscreens arent coming to MacBooks for a long time, if ever. Frankly its an attitude I wish other laptop-makers would have.

The case against touchscreen laptops

There are arguments to be had both for and against touchscreen laptops, but for me its always felt like an awkward feature thats been added in retroactively without actually considering what its supposed to do.

While iOS, iPadOS, and other mobile operating systems have been built with touch in mind from the beginning, Windows and MacOS have not. Instead they had their beginnings decades ago, and have fully integrated a system thats based on keyboards and mice cursors not the stubby little digits we call fingers. For that reason Ive always found laptop touchscreens completely counterintuitive, because most of the icons are too small for my fingers to be completely accurate.

Not to mention the fact that the increasingly small bezels mean I cant adjust my screen without accidentally toggling something in the process. The same goes for getting rid of smudges and other debris the display can accumulate.

Laptop makers dont have touchscreens on all their machines, but it seems like all the good ones push it on you as standard. Apple, thankfully, has not done that, and if I didnt dislike macOS quite so much it would be one of the things that would save me the hassle of disabling touch control in Windows 10s control panel. While I still can, at any rate.

No doubt people will disagree with me, but there are other reasons why Apple is so against adding touchscreens to MacBooks.

There needs to be space for the iPad

Apple has really been pushing the iPad (and iPad Pro in particular) as the successor to the laptop in recent years, adding more productivity-centric hardware and features to make the tablet more appealing for working on. Those efforts come across as rather half-hearted, because despite Apples insistence that iPads are better, it cant realistically make that vision a reality while MacBooks exist.

That being said, MacBooks and iPads are very different devices, because obviously one is a laptop and one is a tablet no matter how many accessories you can buy to make it look otherwise. But the key thing that stops those lines getting increasingly blurred is the touchscreen. Add a touchscreen to a MacBook and suddenly the iPad may well seem less appealing.

At the very least it undoes a lot of the effort Apple has put in to position the iPad as a desirable laptop alternative. Because as much as it wont abandon the MacBook, its not going to give it special features that would, in all likelihood, help make the iPad obsolete. Its not good business to outdo your own products, after all.

Outlook

Is the MacBook always going to remain touchscreen-free? Never say never, but Apple isn't really one to only think in the short term, so its not going to be happening for quite a long time. Those of you who were really holding out for a touchscreen MacBook are no doubt disappointed, but at least theres the iPad Pro.

As adamant that Apple is that this line will never be crossed, the other lines between Macs and iPads are getting increasingly blurred with time.