This week, the Jolt drinking designer types and marketing gurus have outdone themselves. They have bestowed upon us a brand-new, sixteen-inch MacBook Pro. And its headline trick? You can touch the screen.
Yes, really. They want you to reach across the keyboard—past the perfectly functional trackpad, past the perfectly good keys—and proffer a greasy, thumbprint-laden finger straight onto a display that costs more than a decent holiday in the Maldives.
It is, without doubt, the most staggeringly unnecessary development in human computing since the invention of the blinking paperclip.
Now, Steve Jobs—a man who, whatever you thought of his turtleneck collection, possessed a brain—was famously, furiously opposed to this very concept. Years ago, he stood on a stage, looked the world in the eye, and told us that touchscreen laptops were “ergonomically terrible.” He explained, with the patient clarity of a man speaking to a toddler, that vertical surfaces do not want to be touched. If you poke at a standing laptop screen for more than four minutes, your arm begins to ache. After ten minutes, your shoulder feels as though it’s being gnawed off by a bear. “It doesn’t work,” Jobs declared. “It’s arm-fatiguing.”
He was completely right, of course. Holding your arm out in mid-air to tap a button on an upright screen is a form of self-harm.
We’ve seen this exact movie before. Cast your mind back to the Touch Bar. Remember that? A tiny, glowing ribbon of glass planted just above the numbers, designed to replace the top row of keys. Apple told us it was a revolution. They told us it would change how we edited photos and typed emojis.
And what happened? Absolutely nothing. Nobody used it. It was awkward, it was in the wrong place, and if you accidentally brushed it while reaching for the backspace, your entire screen would suddenly zoom into a picture of a turnip. It was a classic case of cleverness over usefulness. In the end, Apple quietly binned it and gave us back the physical keys, pretending the whole embarrassing episode had never happened.
And this giant touchscreen is going to suffer the exact same fate.
Think about the sheer, unadulterated madness of it. You are sitting at a desk. Underneath your hand sits a trackpad so smooth, responsive, and precise that you can edit microscopic detail with the gentlest twitch of a finger. Why on earth would you abandon that ergonomic triumph, lean forward like a confused gorilla, and smudge a half-eaten sandwich across a gorgeous 16-inch display just to close a window?
You wouldn’t. Nobody will. For the first three days, people will proudly poke at a spreadsheet to show off to their colleagues. By day four, their shoulders will be screaming, their screens will look like a crime scene covered in grease marks, and they will revert—as water always finds its level—back to the mouse and the trackpad.
It is a gimmick. A multi-thousand-dollar exercise in vanity designed to give executives something new to read off a teleprompter. Steve Jobs knew it was rubbish, you know it’s rubbish, and deep down, the engineers in Cupertino know it’s rubbish too.
That is not to say that, if it weren’t for the price (entry level $4600), this would be a very good MacBook to have – its lighter and a MacBook has never had an OLED display, so arguably has never looked better. It is also heartwarming to note, unlike the Touch Bar that appeared in older Macbooks, that this touchscreen stupidity can be turned off and you can enjoy this beautiful MacBook Pro for all of the other – more significant – reasons.
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