Oops! Apple just put the touchscreen of its first laptop on the wrong MacBook
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Well, it finally happened: Apple moved with the times and finally made a touchscreen laptop. However, while the new MacBook Pros with PROLED displays look like fantastic devices, I think Apple has made a mistake by putting its first laptop touchscreen on the more expensive MacBook Pro instead of the more conventional MacBook Air… or even the MacBook Neo.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro with touchscreen starts at $2,899 / £2,899 / AU$4,599, and the 16-inch model starts at $3,399 / £3,399 / AU$5,499. That’s a big ask for most people, especially these days.
Of course, MacBook Pros, as the name suggests, are aimed at professionals and, thanks to their high-end components, they should really be seen as investments that allow you to speed up your workflow.
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Interestingly, the new touchscreen MacBook Pros come with Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. If you want Apple’s latest M6 chip, you’ll have to opt for the non-touchscreen 14-inch MacBook Pro that was announced a few days earlier. Perhaps confusingly, the M6 is less powerful than the M5 Pro and M5 Max, and so far there is no indication that Apple is preparing to launch the M6 Pro and M6 Max chips.
What I mean is that by putting the first laptop touchscreen on its most powerful (and expensive) MacBooks, Apple is severely limiting the potential audience for this technology. If you had instead put a touchscreen on the more affordable MacBook Air, you could have had a real hit on your hands.
Who is it for?
As someone who has used many Windows laptops and touchscreen Chromebooks in the past, I know how useful they can be for certain tasks and I often miss them when using a MacBook.
Being able to scroll down a website with one finger, turn a page in an e-book, or quickly tap a menu item feels natural and intuitive, and I’m sure that will be the case on the new MacBooks. My daughter, who grew up with touch screens in everything, would also instinctively touch a finger, often sticky and dirty (kids, you gotta love them!), on the screen of a MacBook and was surprised when nothing happened.
If you’re spending more than $3,000 on a touchscreen laptop just to use the touchscreen to browse websites, then you’re either super rich or you should get help with your budget.
These are all pretty simple tasks and gestures. However, I have never used touch screens on laptops for complex tasks and tools, such as recording and editing music in Ableton Live or editing videos in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Instead, for things that needed precision or complexity, nothing beats the good old keyboard and trackpad combo (or better yet, keyboard and mouse), as well as other external peripherals like MIDI controllers and drawing tablets. Which leads me to wonder why Apple chose the MacBook Pro, a device that’s supposedly designed for exactly those kinds of tasks, to showcase its first touchscreen laptop.
If you’re spending more than $3,000 on a touchscreen laptop to use primarily for browsing websites, then you’re either super rich or you should get help with your budget.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and no touchscreen starts at $2,999 / £2,999 / AU$4,799. As the MacBook Pro with PROLED
Yes, I know that the PROLED
If you’re a professional, especially one in the creative industry, you’ll need to think carefully about whether that investment is worth it. Meanwhile, models like the MacBook Air and MacBook Neo aren’t really used for complex creative tasks, but are instead used for casual everyday use, where touchscreens are much more useful.
Of course, adding an extra $400 / £400 / AU$700 to the price of a MacBook Neo or MacBook Air wouldn’t be great, especially since they just suffered a price hike earlier this year, but Apple wouldn’t need to include the OLED technology and advanced image quality options included in the MacBook Pro. A MacBook Neo with a touchscreen for $899, say, could be a real hit, especially if Apple also kept the non-touchscreen model for people who still want the shape. more affordable to enter the Mac ecosystem.
Of course, this isn’t just an Apple problem. Nvidia’s new RTX Spark SoC-powered laptops, which are aimed at the same creative professionals and local AI users as the MacBook Pro (with similarly high prices), come with touchscreens. I spent a good amount of time with each at various events and found that the touchscreen was the least used part of the laptop; in fact, I often forgot those laptops had one. Because there are no cheaper, non-touch models, although I didn’t mind their inclusion.
Like I said, I do I have the appeal of touchscreen laptops, but I think the technology is best used in 2-in-1 devices where the keyboard can be flipped behind the screen (or removed entirely) so it can be used as a tablet-like device.
So in an ideal world, Apple would have put its touchscreen on a brand new 2-in-1 MacBook, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Apple type of has a device like that: the powerful iPad Pro, which can be paired with a Magic Keyboard that turns it into a touchscreen laptop. The problem, however, is that despite coming with Apple’s powerful M-series chips, the same ones you’ll find in MacBooks, the iPad Pro is limited to the iPadOS operating system and mobile apps.
However, put macOS on that bad boy and let us run full desktop apps on it, and voila: Apple has a touchscreen MacBook that uses the technology in a way that’s actually useful. Until then, I’ll stick with my standard MacBook Pro and try to remember not to poke it with my sausage fingers too often.
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