I've had a Macbook Air for a while now and my problem with the Surface is simply that I've never once desired to have a touchscreen on my little laptop. The large trackpad and keyboard are superior to a touch interface in almost every way for me.
I have an iPad that my parents got for me, and I struggle to force myself to use it because the entire touch interface seems inferior. Every time I lay down in bed with my iPad, I end up regretting it as soon as I have to type anything or use a website that doesn't have a really well-engineered mobile version or iPad app.
The touch interface seems ideal on much smaller devices, like phones, where it's not even remotely feasible to have a keyboard and a trackpad. I personally don't understand the desire to transfer it to larger devices, though.
The one major saving grace of touch-centric devices like the iPad, IMHO, is that it has made computing and the internet more accessible to people who otherwise wouldn't have learned to use traditional interfaces for whatever reason.
Touch on laptops (and not tablets/convertibles) is great as a secondary input. I hate how Apple presents it as if it would replace trackpads on laptops, as opposed to being there for the occasional gesture.
This makes a lot of sense when you wonder why they aren't putting a touch screen on the Macs. Microsoft took a desktop OS and bolted a touch screen onto it. Apple will take a tablet OS and bolt a keyboard onto it.
[edit] Makes even more sense when you consider who has what apps. Microsoft had a huge lead in Windows apps, so of course you want to bolt your touchscreen onto that. Apple has the huge lead in iOS apps, so better to bolt a keyboard onto that than a touch screen onto the Mac.
MacOS is not designed for touch-based computing. It's interesting that Microsoft's merging of tablet+desktop metaphors might finally be paying off (after 4 years!) - but I can't imagine app support is that good outside 1st party apps. Plus you still have/need a trackpad, right?
This is one reason why Apple will either have to eventually cave in and make laptops with touchscreens or just give up and just make ipads (I supposed they could say they will just make both so consumers can choose). They are teaching a generation of people to touch their screen. I see my college students using the touchscreen on their windows laptops all the time (I hardly ever use the touchscreen on my laptop). It is only a matter of time before noting having a touchscreen on a laptop will be seen as a serious deficiency in the eyes of consumers.
The problem is that all user interface paradigms that work with touch are fundamentally incompatible with a keyboard and vice versa.
Can you operate IOS from a keyboard entirely? No.
Can you operate windows from a keyboard entirely? Yes.
Can you operate windows 8 from a keyboard entirely? No.
The paradigms are so disparate it's unreal and they will never work together without massive compromise.
The MacBook touchpad is only so large because its impossible to use the keyboard to drive OSX. Its a crutch. However it easier to position with a pointing device than a finger on its own as you can scale movements.
Metro is shit - in typing this on a lumia. Its horrible but my other half is on Facebook on my Lenovo t61 (she uses only the keyboard and clitmouse which is incredibly accurate with some practice). Nokia 6303 is in the post.
I have long been torn on the idea of touch screen on a Mac. I feel like by now Windows should have shown us that the different ways in controlling the OS leads to problems and just doesn't mesh well.
You end up with buttons that are way to large to allow for finger taps that make no sense with a mouse, so a lot of wasted space.
Forcing stupid gestures and UI animations that make zero sense with a keyboard and mouse.
And of course, the fact that you have legacy applications that will never be updated to fully support it (and likely even new ones) and the experience will never be great.
A single device that is meant to be fully usable with a k/m and touch screen is always going to be a compromise for one (or both) setups. At least iPad OS while you can attach a k/m (with decent results if really not how it was designed to be used) the OS is clearly touch first.
I doubt we are ever going to truly see an OS that can handle both with the respect that each input method deserves. The only way I really see that possible is if the OS forces every application to use built in libraries for navigation, buttons, etc (and I mean force!, like it would not run if you don't use it) and the OS then shifts between the 2. But even then you could not naturally switch between, oh I am typing but let me just press this button on the screen because the OS would be on a specific mode.
Its easy to say that Apple just wants to sell us another device, but let's not forget that Microsoft tried and failed... horribly... And we still see the problems with this idea in Windows 11.
Apple's explanation of why a touch UI would be horrible on an iMac or MacBook suggests strongly that they are not interested in moving to a touch screen and touch pads with gestures are the future.
After 12 years on Macs I picked up a touchscreen PC and would simply never go back to a non-touch machine, it is not essential, but it is incredibly convenient. Why shouldn't it be possible to touch rather than tap when appropriate? After a few months selecting an appropriate option for any particular input is totally natural and subconscious. I have no idea why noting the lack of touch on a Mac should be considered "biased".
I totally used to agree with that, but it only took one hour with a touchscreen windows PC to make my MacBooks all feel broken.
I still mainly use my MacBook Pro, because overall, Windows just doesn't cut it for what I need to do. And I personally don't really need touch that often -- but every single time I do (on the phone, holding a baby, jerking off with right hand, whatever), it is maddening that it doesn't work.
Even if limited to just basic scrolling and tapping, basic touch screen support is still way better than nothing. I think you are right about why Apple doesn't do it yet, but I think Apple is utterly wrong not to do it for that reason.
It's a classic case of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Truly awesome touch (and stylus!) support would be great; no touch support at all just feels incorrect.
Except that Apple spent a decade telling us it won't be a thing, which is why they never put a touch screen on a Mac. Until 2018 it had never been a thing. Supposedly this is iOS's remit, and designing the entire OS for solely touch (iOS) or solely mouse and keyboard (MacOS), they argue, is the better way forward.
Your arguments are perfectly valid for many other computer platforms, where mixed direct/indirect input exists. It has never existed on the Mac, supposedly by design, until now when Marzipan has provided a path for these touch UIs to ship on them. This is why it feels especially wrong on the Mac.
It looks like Apple is trying to find an alternative to touchscreens just because Steve Jobs once said they're bad.
For me, touchscreens are perfectly useful on laptops, since directly tapping something is much quicker than moving my hand to the trackpad, locating the cursor, moving it around and finally clicking something.
I don’t really understand the value of a touch screen on a laptop. Specially for a Software Developer. It is easier and quicker to move your hand (while typing) to the touch pad rather than to the display. I think TouchBar (which is underrated) makes sense because in that case you don’t need to move your hand up, it just is there along with the keyboard. Plus I really don’t like those huge touch-optimised buttons on Windows. A laptop is meant to be used with a mouse pointer which is much much more precise than a finger, hence allowing macOS to display smaller buttons maximising screen realestate.
If that's the reason why, then I guess I don't want a touch screen mac. Looking at my screen now, I would fat finger just about everything if it was a touch screen as sensitive as my iPhone (where I fat finger quite a few of things, and my fingers are really quite narrow). The mouse is a precision instrument. Your finger is not. I'd hate for the UI to suffer due to catering toward a less precise input I have no intention of ever using.
They’re two different worlds though. The world of precision input devices (keyboard/mouse) and relative openness (to running/developing software) and then the world of imprecise fat-finger touch input and the walled-garden landgrab.
So far not even Apple has figured out how to make genuinely complex/feature-rich UIs (think Photoshop, XCode, Maya) work on a touchscreen device. Their best solution so far seems to be adding a keyboard and pointing device in the form of the Pencil.
Mildly amusing is how everyone else is wrong until Apple does it.
If you're going to use these things with a keyboard and like it then why was Microsoft so roundly mocked for championing touch screen laptops in the first place?
Apple sells products, not hacks. Apple doesn't clutter their SKUS with niche features that work poorly are almost never useful. Adding touch to a laptop or desktop just so you can occasionally touch scroll is deeply overkill.
They sell iPads that are touch-enabled, that work well with touch.
Touch is a great input method. Cursors are a great input method. Apple is the only computer company not offering a device with both.
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