macOS Touch

The Dynamic Island is a kludge. No one who actually wants a Mac that can accept drawing input (you know, by having an iPad Pro screen) wants dynamic islands, notches, or any of this stupid breaking-the-unbroken-rectangle nonsense.

Bezels are necessary to rest your hand against, and that's where webcams belong.

"That sounds a lot like an iPad running macOS or, for that matter, a Microsoft Surface or any number of Windows hybrid laptops."

That seems like a great direction, because these devices are awesome. Except that I have lost all trust in Apple's design abilities, so I expect this to accelerate the enshittifcation of MacOS with mobile UI design.

> "...Presume this will be enabled for the upcoming touchscreen MacBooks..."

Speaking personally, I have no need for a laptop with a touch screen. But bias aside, let's consider both form factor and cost. Or better yet, targeted users.

(1) Cost. Apple's hardware (despite upper-level and rising) profit margins will be going up this calendar year. Forget about the reasons - just consider how much this touch-screen laptop will be. Vision Pro, anybody? This is all I wish to say about cost.

(2) Form factor. Why a laptop? If it's portability, Apple already makes it. Just make iPadOS behave like macOS. If you wish to use current hardware (macOS) hardware offerings have a touchscreen monitor, why not do just that - make an external monitor with touchscreen capability driven by the OS?

(3) Target users. Apple missed it with Vision Pro. To use a phrase from a former CEO at Apple, where is the puck headed? AI, CPUs, tariffs, data centers. Focusing on CPUs, it's not like the price of oil, where demand is fairly static, but 2026 saw a tightening of supply. No, for CPUs, you have data centers that have seen a spike in demand for CPUs. I would say if your basic iPad Air and MacBoon Neo are US$599, and your 14 inch MacBook Pro is US$1699, a better fit is not something small and portable, but something larger targeting "corporate" users with the money to buy it. Remember, they already portability in an iPad - if only it ran macOS. :-)

It’s toaster fridge time!

I don't know how Apple usually handle new hardware, but wouldn't they have talked about this, and their foldable phone at WWDC?

Don't they want developers to be involved ahead of launch?

> but wouldn't they have talked about this, and their foldable phone at WWDC

They did talk about it, just not in those words.

I’d expect a touch Mac to need more developer buy-in than the Touch Bar. A lot more

Every app will be touchscreen-compatible right away, out of the box.

It's also much more obvious how to add support for, say, a pen than for a touchbar.

I actually think touch-screen laptops could be done right, but, generally, I think the right path is to take iPad OS and just open it up to be more macOS like in its permissiveness. I mean, maybe not iPadOS 26/27 because that is hot garbage, but I think building your unified OS with iPadOS first and just bringing to it all the openness and capability of macOS will work better than trying to bring touch to macOS. Anything that requires hover gestures, a distinction between pointers and touch, and assumes a keyboard is going to be compromised. Starting with a touch-first OS is a better path towards a universal OS than starting with a mouse-keyboard first OS.

Now do I think Apple will do this well? No. I think they are going to make something that is a toaster-fridge with no unified model but one that works with compromises everywhere.

Wistfully remembers the Modbook. No touch, just a Wacom pen.

I'd rather that, than an iPad. Especially given Wacom's click-lock with hover, so you could click one end of the pen's rocker switch, and now whatever you've clicked is locked to the pen tip. You can lift the pen out of range after click-locking a window titlebar, put the pen back in range on a different place on the display, and the window jumps instantly to that place. It made moving stuff around SO easy.

Eliminating the need to *drag* from drag & drop was a UX achievement that most people just never experienced.

Did Apple add any new APIs for processing touches from a touch screen? I'm wondering if you interact with macOS 27 using an iPad, does it just produce normal mouse clicks for single touch interactions or is there actual multi-touch functionality that you wouldn't just get from the trackpad?

@Bri Yes, they really want you to use gesture recognizers.

The AppKit session recommends to use new APIs, but no sample code for dragging with gestures was provided (or how to move away from tracking loops). macOS27: double click using NSClickGestureRecognizer is broken in editable NSImageView. Single click or non-editable works. This worked before.

A thinner Pro? We have been there 7 years ago, I vividly remember Jony’s thin, hot and permanently struggling machines.

And as an owner of M3 Max that throttles down to about 60 % of performance two minutes after start of any game that taxes CPU and GPU at once, I don’t want to shave a single milimeter down.

"And as an owner of M3 Max that throttles down to about 60 % of performance two minutes after start of any game that taxes CPU and GPU at once"

I think this is less of a thickness problem and more of an "Apple selling inadequate cooling as a feature" problem. This has taken over Apple's customer base to the point where Gruber talks about Windows PCs with cooling fans as if properly cooling a computer was a deficiency:

"If any of these are fanless, I’d expect that to be a touted feature. If I’m wrong and one or more of these are fanless, let me know and I’ll post an update. But if they’re not fanless, it’s hard to say they’re MacBook Air peers."

@Plume That would be Air/Neo - I agree there should be fanless, on Pros they seem to have designed one-size-fits-all pipeline, and the higher end chips just run out of thermal headroom the same way they did in Intel era Pros.

> I agree there should be fanless

Disagree. Every laptop needs active cooling. Even a Raspberry Pi needs active cooling if it's actually used.