Touch is the second most exciting part of the new MacBook Pro

A few days ago, Apple released a new product: a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen. But I think they actually released two things, and to understand what’s going on, you need to distinguish between them.

The first, of course, is a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen. That’s a first for the Mac, which is notable. The second thing, and the thing I think is even more important, is a version of macOS that fully supports touch. It doesn’t support touch only in a special mode, or for a limited set of interactions and UI elements. Touch is a first-class way to use macOS.

I did order one of the new MacBook Pros, and I’m excited about getting it in a few weeks. However, as I’ve written before, my dream device isn’t a clamshell laptop with a touchscreen. That’s the lowest-hanging fruit, and the easiest first product for Apple to release, so I understand why they did it, but I don’t think this is the end of the road. It isn’t the ultimate form of what a Mac with touch can be.

The clamshell laptop we all know and love is fundamentally designed around an operating system that requires a keyboard and trackpad, right? Everything about that design stems from that requirement, from the ergonomics to how the internal weight is distributed and where the components go.

But once you can do everything with touch, those physical constraints totally change. The iPad is a clear example of what’s possible when a keyboard and mouse are optional. They aren’t mandatory parts of the device, and therefore there’s no separate slab for the compute, storage, and battery. It all goes behind the screen, because the screen is all you need. Now, you totally could make a clamshell laptop with more ports, battery, and cooling that ran iPadOS, but not to be rude to iPadOS, but for what?

Of course, Apple is happy to sell you a keyboard and trackpad for any iPad, and over the years, this laptop-style form factor has only become more common. iPadOS has also become more and more friendly to cursor-based input.

I think an iPad form factor is the dream in terms of flexibility. You can use it in every way you’d use a MacBook: with a keyboard and trackpad on your lap, or connected to a monitor and other accessories at your desk, like a desktop. But you can also pull the screen away from everything else and carry it around. The reason that works is that you don’t need those other input methods to use the device. They unlock new functionality and make some things easier, but they aren’t required.

When I think about the Mac, I don’t see a single reason there couldn’t be a future device that looks a lot like an iPad. Think about all the use cases people have for iPads in professional environments. They use them because they’re small and ergonomically easy to use, but they’re limited to the software allowed to run on iPadOS. I’m not saying all those iPad use cases would go away, but I promise there are people who would be liberated by the idea of getting a little Mac in a screen they can fully customize and control, turning it into exactly the device they want. This is even more true today in the era of vibe coding custom software than it ever was in the past, and all of that is happening on macOS, not iPadOS.

I’m sure there are more form factors that make sense, and maybe Apple is pursuing them already. I’ll close the same way I did on my podcast yesterday: I want my fellow tech community members to think bigger, to think more audaciously. Don’t think like someone committed to the idea that macOS shall never have touch – we don't live in that world anymore. Instead, think the way we’d hope Apple themselves would think: now that we have this whole new way to use a Mac, what can we do now?

Maybe, just maybe, technology in the future will be different from what we have today. We should consider what that might be.