A Touchscreen MacBook Exists / How This Hack Changes Apple's Stance

This is something that technically should not exist. It's a touchscreen MacBook. It uses a piece of tech called magic screen and it's not like a software hack or like an iPad taped to a MacBook. Who would be so stupid to do something like that, right? This is legit. This is an actual touchscreen enabled MacBook and it's like you can use your finger as mouse cursor. You can go into browsers and use it as such. And you can also go in Photoshop and use it with the pen. Like you get full pen support, touch support. It's a legitimate touchscreen. Now, having used this for a little bit, it's actually changed the way that I think about the concept of a touchscreen MacBook in the first place. So, if you look at the

high-end laptop market right now, most Windows laptops just have touchscreens. If it's like a Surface laptop or Dell XPS product or Lenovo Yogas or Asus Zenbooks, they just have touchscreens. Even gaming laptops sometimes have touchscreens. It's not like a super important deal breaking feature, but it's just a nice thing to have sometimes but to interact with your computer with your fingers and if you ever want to just casually browse and poke around, it's it's a thing that so many Windows laptops have that it's not really a selling point anymore. It's just a thing that exists that you occasionally use. But Apple's stance on this whole feature

is very different. They've actually been quite adamant to not include touchscreens on any of their laptops. Like back in 2010, Steve Jobs famously called vertical screens, like the ones you'd see on a laptop, called them ergonomically terrible for touch. And this has been their stance for 15 years, right? If you want to get an Apple computer with touch, iPad. If you want a laptop, like it's mouse or touchpad, that's it. End of story. Now, maybe there's merit to what he was thinking because even though touchscreens on Windows laptops are so commonplace, most people who have touch enabled Windows laptops don't even use that functionality because it is a little bit tiring to poke at constantly and it smudges your screen with

fingerprints. And for most laptops, the form factor just isn't built for touch. Like, the two-in-ones great, but most clamshell laptops, like, it's okay, but you got to tilt it a certain way, and it's not like a primary way to interact with computers. Now, even though Windows devices have had touch screens for like two decades, the touch experience is just okay at best. Microsoft tries, like, when you detach a keyboard or use a touch screen, it can space out the icons, and there's animations and little tweaks to make it a little bit more usable, but it's never felt purpose-built for touch because it isn't. Which brings us back to this device here. So, this is a regular 14-in MacBook Pro. And this is the magic screen.

So, this is when it's just not connected. It's a sheet of plastic with a digitizer on it, and it attaches to the screen magnetically. This version, at least to my understanding, needs a cable. I don't know about future iterations of it, but once you've connected it up, it is a fully functional touch screen. That's all you need to do. Connect the cable and touch screen activated. Now, the hardware itself is genuinely impressive. It's built really well, and it supports the pressure-sensitive pen that it comes with. It even has a case that folds into a stand to brace the screen so it doesn't wobble when you poke at it, and you can use the digitizer separately like a Wacom tablet. And for what this is, the pricing is reasonable. But

having used this for a little bit, it's kind of exposed this flaw that I can't overlook. If Apple themselves came out with a touch screen MacBook today with the current version of macOS, I think it would just be a unpleasant experience for most people. Arguably even worse than Windows 11. So, macOS is built entirely around the precision of a mouse cursor. Like, the touch targets are tiny. Renaming a file or trying to drag a window or even interacting in the menus with your finger feels like clunky and not particularly precise. And obviously, none of this was built for touch controls. This is macOS. It's not supposed to have touch.

I will say though for a third-party product, this is awesome. Like the technology is great. It's just the software is clearly not built for this type of interaction. But there's strong speculation that Apple themselves are working on a touchscreen MacBook that's supposed to release as early as this year. And the question that I think most people would have on hearing this is why now? Like why after 20 years of just adamantly saying no, no touchscreens on laptops, why now? So, I think it comes down to a few things. The first is the available hardware now. So, for years the idea of a touchscreen laptop meant they had to add an additional digitizer layer on top of your display stack,

which makes it a little bit heavier, a little bit thicker, you cut down on brightness, like the whole image quality is reduced by the presence of that touchscreen layer. But now there's technology that has the touch-sensitive components built into the display stack itself, which gives you perfect image quality while having touch capabilities. Now, the second reason as to why now is macOS itself. So, the most recent version of macOS with its liquid glass design language, all of the design elements are like bigger, rounder, and just more prominent than previous versions. And supposedly the next version of macOS will have dynamic UI elements that will shift around depending on how you interact with them.

Like right now, if you try to tap the red, yellow, and green buttons with your fingers, it's an awful experience because your fingers are just so much bigger than the hit targets. But with an adaptive UI, the OS could dynamically scale the hit targets and the icons the moment you reach for the screen. And it just makes that experience feel so much more fluid and usable. Now, the third reason as to why Apple would be doing this is because of universal apps. Ever since Apple moved over to their own silicon, like Apple silicon, even on M1, you could run Apple's iPhone and iPad apps on your MacBook. But the experience is usually pretty clunky because these apps were designed to be used with your finger,

not like a mouse cursor that you click around. And so a touchscreen on a MacBook would bring a lot of usability to those games and applications. And the same for developers, like they would now be able to test their iPad and iPhone apps directly on their laptops by touching the screen instead of like trying to simulate those touches with a mouse click. Now, there's a fourth kind of reason that I think as to why this whole touchscreen laptop is going to exist. So, I mentioned in a previous video about like the MacBook lineup that the entry-level MacBook Air has become incredibly good. Like the M4 and M5 MacBook Airs are so powerful and priced so competitively that it's just closed

the gap between what a pro product is and what like their Air product is. And a new MacBook product, like their top-tier super MacBook, would be like with the touchscreen and the OLED screen, it now just gives the enthusiast market and like the super professional market a reason to drop crazy money on like a new kind of MacBook. And not that this is their goal, I'm not saying that, but they'd have the opportunity cuz this would create a new higher-tier price ceiling for the entire MacBook lineup. Uh so, there you have it. This Magic Screen technology is very cool. It's like a glimpse into the forbidden world of a touchscreen MacBook. You can clearly tell though that the software

just isn't cut out for it right now. All signs point to a fully redesigned, revamped MacBook in the relative near future with touchscreen capabilities and an OLED screen, so we'll see how that shakes out. Okay. Hope you guys enjoyed this video.