By: Nick Gambino
After doing away with any touchscreen features on the MacBook when they ditched the Touch Bar, Apple is reportedly working on a new touchscreen MacBook Pro.
Bloomberg reports that Apple is planning to add the feature in a limited capacity by 2025. This will be the first time the company has added the feature to any of their computers. With Microsoft having offered this in various products for years, I think Apple was feeling left out.
The name of the game is never go stale and sometimes that means giving into a feature that you always said you’d never add. Steve Jobs notoriously said touchscreen and Mac just don’t go together, insisting that “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.” While I understand that constantly having to touch a laptop screen in order to interact can be tiring, offering the option for commands here and there isn’t a terrible idea.
Though they’re adding OLED displays, the future MacBook Pro will not be incorporating touch-friendly iPadOS or iOS into the laptop. Instead it will continue to operate on MacOS and allow for simple taps and gestures much like the Microsoft Surface Laptop.
Now, I do support adding the feature, but that was kind of the idea behind the Touch Bar, wasn’t it? Give unintrusive touchscreen capability to the MacBook. The reason they ended up getting rid of the little bar is that nobody was really using it. In fact, I’m typing on a MacBook Pro right now and just looked down and realized it has a Touch Bar. I completely forgot about it. I would have to deliberately train myself to start using it which just illustrates the fact that’s not an organic user-friendly tool.
If they add that functionality to the screen, perhaps it’ll encourage people to use it more because it’s built into the place where you’re looking and not tucked away from your line of vision.
Again this is all in testing and while Bloomberg sources may be right, we have no way of knowing whether the touchscreen OLED display will actually show up in the 2025 Macbook Pro. We’ll have to wait and see.
