Touchscreen Macs in 2025 - is it True?

IMO the Thinkpad Yoga is a practical design for a touchscreen laptop.

I love change when it is for the better. I do not consider mobile apps brought to the Mac via the Catalyst framework to be an improvement in the Mac experience.

iPhones and iPads are held in the hand when using their touch interface. Think how much farther your arm has to stretch to reach an iMac screen or a Studio Display. I think a multi-touch trackpad is a great compromise between a full-on touch interface, a screen smeary with fingerprints, and the greater distance youā€™d have to reach for one of the larger Macs.

Do you use a large iPad with a physical keyboard as your main system? If not, why not? If so, why is that not enough?

Yes, I have an iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard and still find myself reaching up every now and then for minor tasks that are quicker to touch than using a mouse or track pad, and a track pad is no substitute for signing documents/quick pdf annotations as a pen and touch screen.

I donā€™t think people will use the touch screen in a regular basis or for intense work projects. I think it will be a nice feature for those times when itā€™s a better option than a track pad/mouse.

Doesnā€™t sound worth the effort then on Appleā€™s part.

Unless other people have the same idea as me and will spend extra money on it. Iā€™d rather spend an extra couple hundred dollars on a touch screen MacBook than to buy a $1000 iPad and have to carry around two devices. Which, personally, I think this is why Apple hasnā€™t made touch screen Macs yet, but thatā€™s just my opinion.

I ran PCs remotely from an iPad quite a bit in years past, and some Macs too. A touchscreen Macā€™s interface, IMO, would probably have to look and operate quite differently from todayā€™s macOS. IF it was intended to occasionally operate touch only.

And I agree, Appleā€™s sales & marketing departments may be the reason Apple hasnā€™t offered a touchscreen Mac up to now.

This going to sound weird, but historically Apple doesnā€™t just make ā€œthings people would spend extra money onā€. Theyā€™re looking for vacancies in their product lineup where thereā€™s a sizable market that they can do something interesting in.

The other thing Iā€™ve learned from Apple is that they generally donā€™t leave money on the table. If you can buy the laptop you want for $1200, and the iPad you want for $600, the odds of them making an all-in-one device that solves all of your problems for much less than $1800 get to be vanishingly small. :slight_smile:

Personally, if I knew for a fact they had touchscreens in the pipeline (which we donā€™t), I would suspect theyā€™d be working on something to compete with the Surface Studio.

As I see it, just about everything Apple makes is designed to get people to spend extra money. 5GB iCloud, 32GB iPads, 128GB Mac minis . . . In previous years that included overpriced RAM. They donā€™t upgrade the bottom until it becomes necessary.

And they design the SKUs so their entry level devices are not quite enough and each device above has options for just a bit more $$. Itā€™s not evil, just smart marketing.

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Agree 100%. I wasnā€™t trying to say that Apple doesnā€™t want you to spend extra money - more they donā€™t generally enter new market segments or do massive product redesigns just because thereā€™s potentially a few bucks on the table.

Random examples. They donā€™t make a wi-fi router anymore. They donā€™t make (and to my knowledge, have never made) a Thunderbolt dock. For the longest time, they didnā€™t make a separate display. They still donā€™t make a reasonably-priced display.

ā€œAdd a touchscreen to a MacBook and retool macOS for touch targetsā€ seems to me to be a much different animal from selling extra storage in iCloud and linear capacity upgrades in their Mac/iPad/iPhone lines.

Agree. They just need to see a large enough opportunity and enough potential profit to make it worth their while. But again, I donā€™t think itā€™s going to be a great deal compared to the existing options. Apart from the Apple Silicon transition where we eliminated the Intel tax, Appleā€™s prices for hardware are pretty much continuously on an upward trajectory.

Consider the 27" iMac. Wouldnā€™t it be great if the iMac display were separate from the computer, so you could upgrade them independently? Done! I mean, sure, the display now costs as much as the entry-level 27" iMac, but users got extra flexibility that at least some of them wanted.

I would imagine something similar here.

But they do have a history of cannibalizing their own products. So if they see a market opportunity for a touch screen computer I donā€™t think they would hesitate to enter said market.

Theyā€™d rather get $1500 for such a device, then zero if folks are buying it elsewhere.

Why are we not seeing this as an issue with iPads, which are simply touch screen computers, Apple ā€œWhatā€™s a Computer?ā€ ads notwithstanding? Everyone is thinking that this will be an iMac with a touchscreen. What if instead it is an iPad that runs macOS? What if all the changes to macOS are not to make it more iPad like, but to make it more ready to run on iPad type hardware? Having a M-series chip in an iPad makes more sense in that case.

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Fine by me if Apple wants to run some version of macOS on mobile hardware. They split iPadOS off from iOS but that was quite a mild differentiation based mostly on screen size and processor. Iā€™m having a harder time visualizing the evolution of macOS modded to run on iPad hardware. But I have no imagination. :slightly_smiling_face: When Apple finally puts a version of macOS on an iPad, it likely will seem obvious at that point.

But will those who wanted a touchscreen Mac be happy?

I donā€™t know who the market would be for a touchscreen iMac. Artists? Maybe engineers? It probably wouldnā€™t be that useful for an accountant, writer, or customer service representative. And it would probably be very expensive. Microsoftā€™s Surface Studio 2 starts at $4500.

OTOH I can see where a large iPad would be popular with those same artists and engineers as well as executives and others that donā€™t sit at a desk all day banging out content. But why rewrite macOS to use touch? An OS that dates back to the early 80ā€™s. Would it not be better to add features to your existing touch OS?


Iā€™m going to create a reminder to delete this post in a few years if Iā€™m not even a tiny bit correct. :grinning:

Personally, I only date macOS to the NeXT acquisition.

Other than the fact that it would be heavy, Apple could give the iPad size parity with the Mac laptop line and introduce a 16" one. The tech and the silicon is pretty much already there. Not that anything is trivial, but that would be a pretty linear move.

? Are you saying that it was mythological? I seem to recall prices on certain units going down in the Apple Silicon transition. Not by a lot, mind you, but I seem to recall $100 or $200 for a couple of models.

Just based on your wording, which I probably misinterpreted. Deleted my comment.

You must be a LOT better typer than I am on those little tiny touch keyboards. :grin:

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I agree. To me the iPad Mini is about the right size for my fingers to be able to go at a reasonable speed. The iPhone I constantly miss keys and have to go back and fix things.

Iā€™m a decent typist on my 11 inch iPP, but if it wasnā€™t for swipe typing on the iPhone I would have to dictate everything :grinning:.

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Iā€™ve started dictating more on my iPhone lately. Much easier than typing. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You donā€™t have to use the touchscreen all the time, just when itā€™s expedient. I have touch on my work laptop, and there are times when itā€™s simply quicker to do a touch interaction than use the trackpad or mouse.

Every time I use touch on Windows, I subconsciously think all displays are touch, and I have to train myself not to try touching my MBP screen. I just wish all screens were touch by now. Apple has had long enough to get this working, but it seems to be a slow, incremental process of drawing iPad OS and Mac OS closer year by year.

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