Everyone's focused on the touchscreen, but I'm seriously impressed how they managed to cut down the weight.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops? I've never really been drawn to wanting to do that. My mouse is far more accurate and doesn't block my view. But maybe it's just because I don't have it and I would find tons of uses for it. Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen. I guess I can understand for testing iOS/iPad apps but past that I just don't see myself wanting to use that.
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
My work laptop has a touchscreen.
I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.
I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.
In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.
But based on the Ad, they did not show own usage and it doesn't look like the hinge is 180. If that's correct, Apple went absolutely against its own beliefs for UX/UI.
Windows benefits from a touchscreen more often on something like a diagram where you'll be panning around up/down/left/right, zooming, etc because the trackpad situation isn't very good.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
Eh. I don't think the Macbook's trackpad is that good. It's better sure, but it's still not as intuitive panning or rotating over the image directly on a touch screen. And it's still useless for drawing.
I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
> As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing
I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.
I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.
I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.
It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.
I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts
It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.
I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.
I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.
I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.
I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)
I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.
I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.
Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.
I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)
Their demo example for the touch interface is piano keys? That's a 2010 Scott Forstall level of skeuomorphism that doesn't translate well for a laptop screen because it's not convenient.
The hands are also almost in the exact same image Steve Jobs had on a slide during the iPad keynote showing touch on a laptop is not ergonomic. It's poetic, almost.
"We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work," Jobs said at the company's "Back to the Mac" event in 2010. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off," Jobs continued. "It doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible."
Well my arms didn't get longer, that's for sure. Also MacOS and software made for MacOS doesn't optimize for touch targets unlike something that will be distributed on iOS/iPadOS.
I think there was a modifier key + click and drag to simulate a pinch, so at least some gestures can be simulated. But since one is developing for the mobile device, it makes sense to tether the device and send builds to test out on the target device itself.
Macbook Pros attempt to cater to every slim use case simultaneously, with the idea that if they can handle a use case someone else can’t, they’ll sell another laptop.
I agree that a piano demo seems like a bad idea. But damn if I don’t daily long for the iOS 6 days where buttons and tappable areas were well defined and there were some fun and whimsy to the interface. As compared to the flat unintuitive desolate landscape of recent years. I would rather have a big animated cassette deck in my music player than the current overly polished full page advert I get every time I open the app. At least Forstall and his team cared enough.
As a longtime laptop musician, using the QWERTY keyboard to play notes in the absence of a MIDI controller is infinitely preferable to this goofy demo.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
Reminds me of that stupid DJ demo of the touch bar. Did any DJ actually use that in practice? Well if they do they better hold on to their now vintage MacBook.
How is it convenient? A pro workflow is not holding your arm with the finger up in the air trying to avoid accidental taps, when you can get a small 25 key akai midi controller for a 100 usd. And it's small and comes with velocity-sensitive keys and pressure-sensitive pads.
There's no universe this doesn't negatively affect the UX of the OS for non-touch users. You can't simply support (or rather you can half-arse) new affordances without contorting the rest of the already well worn paths.
Er… Yes they have. Liquid Glass is awful. It’s not only ugly (that’s preference, though), it has definitely negatively affected the UX. That’s why they’re adding sliders and options and reversal left and right.
Does that mean you also believe the same to be true for mouse affordances ruining it for keyboard users and vice-versa? Or "touch" is special in this regard?
Mouse affordances don't usually ruin it for keyboard preferrers. Keyboard shortcuts and control are often an afterthought or downright written off because "they can just click" but thats down to laziness or lack of care than some hard and fast rule. However, a keyboard affordance is usually invisible, and a mouse affordance isn't, so they can very happily co-exist without affecting one another. For instance, the Alt modifiers in menus in classic Windows, those have almost no effect at all on anyones ability to click the menu item with a mouse.
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
I'm still on Sequoia for this reason. I want a UI optimized for displaying text content and mouse and keyboard control. Mostly keyboard. I definitely don't want the larger border radius on the windows that would seem to be designed for touch.
Isn't that his point though ? Their plan seems to half-ass touch support (i.e. the menu bar, minimize/close buttons, etc. all stay in their current size), so it seems like a waste of hardware to include a touch screen just for very little functionality. If instead they make the UI friendly to fat fingers, they'd very much affect the mouse/trackpad experience.
What's the point of a touch display if the laptop doesn't have a 360 hinge !? The interaction looks very awkward and unless they stiffen the hinge compared to previous model, the thin screen will keep tilting backwards.
Touch is probably not going to be useful in most contexts, but there are two things that come to mind:
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
For work I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen and these were the only times I have wanted to use it:
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
I have a limited understanding of local LLMs, but from what I gather 128GB is not enough to match DeepSeek v4 Flash or GPT 6.1 Luna. And these models are so cheap right now. What's the use case besides having your data locally?
At this point it's pretty certain they've skipped M6 Pro/Max or they'd be a flagship feature of today's laptop.
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
Pro tip always get the silver macbooks because they wear out considerably better. On the black ones the paint near the charger ends up looking terrible and any dents/nicks/scratches look bad.
Annoys me to no end that fun colors are limited to the "cheap" lines like the Neo, Air, and Duo while Pros are boring. If I'm spending $4k on a laptop then why can't I get it in green? It genuinely makes no sense.
Champagne/Starlight is definitely the way to go when available. Starlight especially, it's mostly silver but sometimes the light catches it just right to give it this sort of iridescent gradient to a light gold.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
Except there is no "paint". Neither are there any "black ones"; space grey isn't very close to black, and I've seen no wear issues of any kind on any of the Macs I support.
If only we could discuss the OLED display rather than an optional feature. I did not see anything in the marketing materials that indicated I would be punished for refusing to utilize the touchscreen.
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
2000 nits peak screen brightness with nano texture is going to look incredible outdoors. Not sure I'm feeling the need to upgrade yet but glad the brightness+coating combo will continue to be a thing
It's interesting that they've decided to release a new high-end model this year even though they aren't coming out with new high-end M6 chips. Apparently they have decided to not make Pro/Max versions of the M6 in favor of accelerating development of the M7 series, which will have improved support for on-device AI. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
The touch screen is such a silly idea here. It even looks ridiculous in their own marketing photos. [1] The keyboard and track pad are already a great combo for getting things done.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
I agree. The ergonomics of using a touch screen on a laptop screen aren't great. It only really works if you convert it to a tablet so that the screen is closer to you and angled up a bit for comfort, but it's no longer a laptop, so why bother?
I am on board for touchscreen (and pencil support) for macOS due to my dream of only carrying an iPad Pro for all development; however, I think they’re making the same mistake as the touch bar - touch is only available on the most expensive Mac’s which will ensure they’re niche. Niche options for user input ensure very few apps get updated to use the new user input (foldable phones, I’m speaking about you).
I’m surprised because Apple has famously (and publicly) argued in the past that touchscreens on laptops were a bad idea. Things can change, of course, but I don’t see anything here that even attempts to invalidates any of the arguments they made against touchscreen laptops at the time, which I still think were pretty compelling.
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
> Up to 13 more hours than Intel-based MacBook Pro
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
That's an additional device, additional financing potentially on a different life cycle, potentially a different account to manage.
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
Hoping for a follow-up convertible touchscreen pen-capable MacBook Air. iPad Pro is just too limiting with iPadOS and it's thicker and heavier than a MacBook Air or any of my convertible Chromebooks.
are you still on the same macbook? Im using the same config and its running solid, note from above is true on the darker colored version, getting some color changes, but its still a beast of a machine.
Not who you responded to, but I am. M3 Max with 128GB and I use every bit of it for photo/video editing and local building/compiling heavy projects. I'm glad I took this configuration then with the way prices are now and don't see myself replacing this for another few years.
Not the poster but I'm also still using my M1 Max 32 GB RAM Macbook bought at the end of 2022 (yes, just right before the M2 Max...) and see no reason to buy another. Also paid 3400 (euros).
Really glad I'm not currently shopping for a new computer.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
> “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,”
> “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
I wasn't sure how I would feel about my newish MBP M5 Max when they released this, but given the price increase, and the fact that I have zero interest in a better screen since I dock most of the time, I am happy I paid $2K less for the same horsepower earlier this year.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
For those HDR video editing / color grading specialists, how do these compare to Samsung + LG OLED TVs, Sony HDR Reference Monitors, or else?
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
I am going to jump on the touch hate bandwagon but more specifically I think it’s odd in the format they designed. I think the MSFT surface is brilliant because you can fold it down into an iPad like device which can be great for travel and other non-desk uses.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
My god they’re really running out ideas in Cupertino. What I need is a screen that gives an electrical shock to anybody that dares to touch it with their filthy fingers.
Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.
Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
I’ve felt for years that they were holding out until they could make a dual touchscreen MacBook work and be a peak experience. I was expecting an iPhone duo type MacBook. That hasn’t happened.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
Some of their examples are absolutely ridiculous, for sure. The lack of a fold-back design, like the surface, with pencil support is also a surprise to me. I suppose they'd still rather sell you an iPad with an operating system they don't let you control rather than bringing their laptop segment up to par with the competition.
But having had to emulate pinch-zoom in an Android emulator has made me wish I had my touch screen laptop back. Emulated touch events also don't work like real touch events, so web dev can also be a bit annoying sometimes.
My company once gave me a touchscreen laptop and I did know that until I touched the screen by accident. It was fun to play but I never found it useful. I heard many people saying the same, some of them even preferred to disable. I find it uncomfortable to touch a laptop screen... The only thing seems to benefit from that for me is photo editing apps or 3D modelling.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
It's just small things. I don't have a touch screen laptop anymore, but being able to physically tap things or reaching over to touch things just felt natural.
I have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a trackpad, yet I rarely use mouse mode on it. Seeing kids interact with laptops for the first time and touching the screen expecting them to work like every other device they use is also probably a sign of the times.
I understand why not everyone likes them, though. Some people prefer to disable their trackpads too, or prefer ball mice, or prefer mouse gestures over keyboard gestures. To each their own. I welcome the diversity.
I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
The pencil is bad enough but how it charges itself is even worse. Lets turn my ipad into a brittle stingray. It's up there with the mouse having to charge upside down for apples top own goals.
1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.
You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.
when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.
Admittedly, Apple has “refused” to do many things over the years (pen support on iPad comes to mind) and yet ends up doing them. Apple refuses to do something until they want to sell it.
FWIW, I don’t understand the appeal of this device at all, but I don’t expect much consistency from Apple.
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.
Get a custom-made cloth or use a thin microfiber like a lens cleaning cloth and put it between the keyboard and screen. Whenever you close the computer. Keeps the smudges off and prevents key shaped wear marks in your display.
I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
Years ago like 2010, 11 Microsoft had demo touchscreen computers running an art application in the Kids Room at the MOMA museum in NYC. It was responsive to actual brushes and was quite an interesting interface. As far as I knew it was a beta.
My god they finally did it. After all the fears of canibalizing iPad sales and gorilla arms. An Apple touchscreen MacBook.
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
CPU + battery in the top-cover kills the balance of the laptop and makes the whole thing heavier. It's a really awkward design compared to a clamshell laptop with a very thin display-only lid.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.
Does this mean that macOS will natively support touch screens so I don't need to look anymore for after-market solutions[0] for mine? That would be cool.
I’m not sure. macOS has had some degree of support for touch screens internally for a very long time (2010) but required hardware specific drivers.
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
If i wanted a touch screen mb air, id get an ipad. i will actively avoid these. apple has been dropping the ball big time lately. ive noticed siri has a 5 second delay on my phone now, making reminder setting not so easy.
Seems like this is essentially a 400$ upgrade for the M6 Pro MacBook Pro. Those 400$ get you better sound, a better display and touch.
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
> Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
Which is why "better than existing macbook pros" isn't a selling point. It's already more than good enough.
The parent comment was saying "better sound" as one of the upgrades you get for the $400, which is a comparison to the currently available macbook pros.
Call me old fashioned, but I think "this one is even better than the last one, and you already liked that one, so imagine how you're gonna enjoy this one", is indeed a selling point. It's one of the most common and enduring marketing strategies.
I always thought if Apple did touch on the macbook it would come with a redesign to merge macOS with touch elements from the iPad. As it stands this feels like more of an afterthought.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
I thought that they would basically replace macbooks with ipad pros. Sort of like microsoft surface, a tablet-laptop combo. Not sure what their plan is now.
Aside: Does anyone else find the new AI texture explosions Apple's using on their marketing pages now a little unsettling and un-Apple? I guess I'm desperate for at least one tech brand to feel / remain human.
Some of my students use touchscreen Windows laptops. They seem to be OK with them but I never found them usable particularly for coding. A touchscreen laptop has ergonomically bad design. Or it could just be a generational thing.
OLED displays now are tandem OLED displays which stack multiple layers. This means you don't need to exponentially crank up the voltage to provide more brightness which also increases lengivity of the panel (and increases battery life).
I have a, what, 2019 LG CX OLED TV. 55". Used in anger as computer monitor since new. With complete disregard for burnout. It's… perfectly fine? I can't see any dimming or patterns or faults at all.
Everybody worried about the usefulness of touch (which I do find occasionally useful), meanwhile they've literally set base pricing at $2900. For a 14 inch mbp, with 24GB. Hilarious.
The fancy OLED display would actually be a potential reason to finally upgrade from my M1 Pro but even if I could afford it, I find prices like that hard to swallow (and I couldn't care less about touch in a laptop fwiw). Guess I'll buy one used in a year or three, maybe.
Not a fan of touchscreen on inclined surfaces, personally. I think the ergonomics of this will be bad for shoulders/elbows.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
Funny how half the press release tries to hide the notch/island/whatever its called. I almost thought they gave up on that, then I finally saw it like 7 or 8 images in.
I see. The iPad and Macbook are converging. Interesting. I can’t say I get the use case but perhaps it will fold in some interesting way that makes it usable. I have no problem using a touchscreen occasionally but in the standard configuration the screen will wobble if you touch it.
Apple's been trying (in vain?) to sell iPad users a Magic Keyboard for six years and add a windowing system to iPadOS to pretend it's a real operating system, so I suppose they're trying to bridge the gap from the opposite (Macbook) side.
Got the m5 pro like last month. Actually no FOMO this time. I wonder how the AMOLED looks irl, I bet it's sweet but the current pro motion is already top notch.
No cellular which is literally the only thing missing from the macbook pro :(
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best
2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
What’s your use case for cellular on a laptop? At least here in Canada data plans are expensive enough that I could blow through my monthly limit in 30min with a laptop. I would be quite annoyed if my wifi dropped and I had discovered only later that I’d exhausted my data unknowingly
My first iPad entirely felt like a waste of money. Any time I'd want to do something useful with it, the mac was a better choice. Not sure what cellular on the iPad would have ever offered me, but I know why I want it on my laptop.
Please tell me the rounded corners at the bottom of the screen are just for the effect and they aren't actually physically like that. This would be worse than the current notch, you can even see them clipping the text in the LM Studio picture.
Cue the folks who have used nothing but Apple laptops for the past 20 years coming here and wondering who would possibly want a laptop with a touch screen.
I think the confusion is lot of Apple enthusiasts drank the kool-aid the company served them saying touch screen is "yuck". And now they have a touch screen, it takes a while to re-orient themselves.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
Doesn't look like it folds back or does tent mode. Those are some good use cases for touchscreen PCs, being able to walk around in tablet mode in something like a warehouse, for example.
So unbelievably disappointing, right after the disappointment of the Duo. I was in the market for both, the early reviews of the Duo stopped me from upgrading, and the landing page of this new Mac has stopped me from upgrading that.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
looks like they brought back the glowing apple logo on the lid for the first time in a decade!
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
Touch screen on a laptop is objectively disgusting. I have a Lenovo yoga X1 or something with a touch screen (and it folds backwards into a tablet) hence the name. It is stupid and useless. I can imagine Steve Jobs turning in his grave right now.
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
Touch screens are dead, no one ever said good things about them. Also, I think the best setup now (regardless macos or linux) is having your heavy lifting compute at home and you use something like macbook air and ssh into it, that way you get the best portability and also you are secure if your laptop is lost.
If the screen were detachable and you get a giant 16'' ipad, I would consider it. I do not want touch interface on a laptop and will never buy this. I do want non-touch OLED screen though.
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
The product itself is fine, I have no strong opinions on it. But what a hell of a disappointing unveiling.
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
Makes sense this event is in LA- this this is designed to be a mobile media creation device. Most users don't care about most of the features that are highlighted in the press release, but someone creating any sort of visual media would.
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
The M7 generation is said to be another huge advance on local LLM performance, so Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and M6 Max to bring out the M7 generation early.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
Maybe this is the reason they doing it now
Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...
I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.
But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...
If you lock the screen position with hardware it just lifts the keyboard when you touch just a little too hard.
You need stability for touch and a superlight laptop just does not have that.
"""
Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?
I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.
Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.
But that's just me, I'm a simple guy, like and subscribe!
"""
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/apple-intelligence/articles/ergono...
Now it's a "how will you still need an iPad" problem, that they have solved perfectly because it's a usability problem.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
It's a nonissue when you look at the state of macOS attention to detail nowadays, regardless of which side of the fence you're on.
To begin with, yes. The decline only started around ten years ago.
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
- Steve Jobs
Apple: check our new vertical touchscreen!
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
(for comparison, M4 pro has 273 GB/s and M1 pro has 200GB/s and M1 max has 400GB/s)
M5 Pro (20-core GPU): 307 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 24 GB, 48 GB, 64 GB).
M5 Max (32-core GPU): 460 GB/s memory bandwidth. (36 GB)
M5 Max (40-core GPU): 614 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 48 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB)
For an M5 max top bin with 128GB Ram:
- mac studio: $5,899.00 (with 2TB ssd bump to match the default macbook sku)
- macbook 16: $7,399.00
Portability gets a hit but I feel you can have a thin client and let the studio do the heavy lifting back at your home/studio(heh).
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
2. Even better speakers
3. Thinner and lighter while retaining the 100 Wh battery
4. No more notch
Seems like a solid all-around update to be. Other than cellular, I can't possibly imagine what more people could want.
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
[1] https://mastodon.social/@allenu/117519656286195439
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZI5uUSdEo
How many Macbook Pro owners are mobile app developers though?
You don’t have to touch it?
I mean it's a $400 up-charge over the same model without touchscreen. Not that unreasonable if you are a heavy app developer IMO.
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
Anything else?
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
I have a Linux laptop with touchscreen, and my main use is to test the touch interactions on web apps, sometimes Android apps.
Sure it's possible to open it on the phone, but that's an extra step usually not justified.
A 16" M3 Max with 128GB of RAM and no other upgrades would have been $5000 at launch.
They started shipping at the end of 2023, so you couldn't have bought a refurb.
Either you're remembering the price wrong or you got a crazy deal.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
> “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,”
> “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
I had it very badly on Intel MBP, and now on my M3 Max. I tried some screen protectors, but none of them stuck (pun intended).
I suppose touch only makes it worse?
Windows laptop took the same path, for the better.
But touch will go about as well as the touchbar did
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
But having had to emulate pinch-zoom in an Android emulator has made me wish I had my touch screen laptop back. Emulated touch events also don't work like real touch events, so web dev can also be a bit annoying sometimes.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
I have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a trackpad, yet I rarely use mouse mode on it. Seeing kids interact with laptops for the first time and touching the screen expecting them to work like every other device they use is also probably a sign of the times.
I understand why not everyone likes them, though. Some people prefer to disable their trackpads too, or prefer ball mice, or prefer mouse gestures over keyboard gestures. To each their own. I welcome the diversity.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
How so? I have an M2, carry it in a bag daily but my screen is still pristine
And if so, has Apple changed the policy from developer opt-in to automatic on touchscreen Macs.
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
This feels more like a marketing gimmick, anyone remember the Touch Bar?
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
I guess if users don’t touch it, then you just have to keep trying with something bigger to touch.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
Or does one still have to go to Dell for that?
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
I'm curious to see this in person. Looks like the "PROLED" is not using an RGB stripe layout.
Pixel density can reduce text fringing, but I have not seen a laptop OLED panel that renders text as well as an LCD yet.
(don't care about the touchscreen)
I was gonna get it for the oled (also don’t care about touch screen) but now it’s also for the glowing logo!
[0]: https://www.touch-base.com/
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
is graphene os ready for primetime yet?
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
The parent comment was saying "better sound" as one of the upgrades you get for the $400, which is a comparison to the currently available macbook pros.
I would probably never touch the screen with my fingers, but I would draw with it. Would also be really useful during calls.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
Brothers, there is a market beyond your bash shells!
;p
I don't like it, it still will be a popular laptop and within 5 years - one of the best. I am moving away from Apple, thank you for a ride!
Don't take me wrong, OLED displays on a a MacBook screen is quite a nice feat compared to regular the regular displays we have as of today.
How on god's green earth is this worth $2900?
I do like how they are brining back ports. I think they need to add back the Ethernet port.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best 2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
iPhone hotspot is slow, unreliable and drains the phone's battery quickly
Luckily i'm in a country where a 600GB 5G plan costs the equivalent of 15$ a month, with 3$ per extra eSIM (watch/computer/car/whatever)
> Draw. Sketch and annotate directly onscreen.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
Dynamic island looks nice.
You'd think Apple would understand the form factor.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
The price is really high too.
Huawei made a Fold laptop that seems to be running Linux already if you're into that.
It doesn't work.
Steve Jobs said this in October 2010 during Apple's "Back to the Mac" special event, where the company was previewing Mac OS X Lion.
Everything is going down the drain right in front of our eyes.
I can't make sense of any counterargument as anything but copium.
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
Especially if they don't even have stylus support
This is so bizarre. I'll never understand Apple fans.
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
Besides holding my arms up it’s also painful to keep my wrists bent to get a better angle for my fingers to articulate.
Really... I would expect this naming from an Onion article.
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
So without that, having touch doesn't make any sense and once again, won't buy this unless the second generation of touch Macbooks are available.
Worked well with the first foldable iPhone Duo didn't it? /s