In as much as you may crave a touchscreen Mac, according to Apple SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, this probably isn’t in the works.
Despite Apple’s iOS-to-Mac app porting tools, universal multiplatform apps, and Apple’s announcement that it will start porting some of its own iOS apps to the Mac this year and allow third party developers to do the same next year, touchscreen Macs are probably not on the table.
When asked if the appearance of iOS apps on the Mac would naturally be followed by the introduction of touchscreen-capable Macs, Federighi showed little enthusiasm, telling Wired‘s Lauren Goode that he’s “not into touchscreens” and doesn’t find the “experiments” with touchscreens in the Windows world compelling.
Federighi offered the following quote regarding the issue:
“We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do. I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there?
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Federighi’s point about hands being rested on a surface while using a laptop mirror Apple’s justification for the introduction of the Touch Bar in 2016. Still, the Touch Bar’s actual value has proven to be controversial, so a touchscreen may be that much further off from occurring on an Apple notebook or desktop.
With or without a touchscreen, there’s a definite trend in porting iOS apps to the Mac and vice versa. Federighi explained during the keynote that Apple is expanding its UIKit and related tools to help developers create logical and useful analogs for interacting with a touchscreen-based app via a keyboard, trackpad, and mouse.
This, in turn, could yield some really cool stuff down the road.
Via The Mac Observer and Wired