Oops! Apple just put its first laptop touchscreen on the wrong MacBook

Well, it’s finally happened: Apple has got with the times and finally made a laptop with a touchscreen. However, while the new MacBook Pros with PROLED screens look like fantastic devices, I think Apple has made a mistake by putting its first laptop touchscreen on the more expensive MacBook Pro, rather than the more mainstream MacBook Air… or even the MacBook Neo.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with a touchscreen starts at $2,899 / £2,899 / AU$4,599, and the 16-inch model starts at $3,399 / £3,399 / $5,499. That’s a big ask for most people, especially these days.

Of course, MacBook Pros, as the name suggests, are aimed at professionals, and thanks to their high-end components, they should really be seen as investments that allow you to speed up your workflow.

Interestingly the new touchscreen MacBook Pros come with Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. If you want Apple’s latest M6 chip, you’ll need to go for the non-touchscreen 14-inch MacBook Pro that was announced a few days earlier. Perhaps confusingly, the M6 is less powerful than the M5 Pro and M5 Max, and so far there are no hints that Apple is preparing to release M6 Pro and M6 Max chips.

My point is that by putting its first-ever laptop touchscreen on its most powerful — and expensive — MacBooks, Apple is severely limiting the potential audience for the technology. Had it instead put a touchscreen on the more affordable MacBook Air, it could have had a real hit on its hands.

Who’s it for?

As someone who has used plenty of Windows laptops and Chromebooks with touchscreens in the past, I know how useful they can be for certain tasks, and I often miss them when using a MacBook.

Being able to scroll down a website with a finger, turn a page in an ebook, or quickly tap a menu item feels natural and intuitive, and I’m sure it will on the new MacBooks. My daughter, who grew up with touchscreens on everything, would also instinctively poke an often sticky, grubby (kids, you’ve got to love them!) finger at a MacBook screen and be surprised when nothing happened.

These are all pretty simple tasks and gestures. What I've never used touchscreens on laptops for, however, is for complex tasks and tools, such as recording and editing music in Ableton Live, or editing videos in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Instead, for things that needed precision or complexity, nothing beat the good old combo of keyboard and touchpad (or even better, keyboard and a mouse), as well as other external peripherals such as MIDI controllers and drawing tablets. Which leads me to wonder why Apple picked the MacBook Pro, a device that’s supposedly designed for exactly those type of tasks, to showcase its first laptop touchscreen.

If you’re dropping $3,000+ on a touchscreen laptop to mostly just to use the touchscreen for browsing websites, then you’re either super-rich or you should get help with your budgeting.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and no touchscreen starts at $2,999 / £2,999 / AU$4,799. As the MacBook Pro with the PROLED XDR touchscreen with the same specs costs $400 / £400 / AU$700 more, that’s quite a premium for the touchscreen.

Yes, I know the PROLED XDR screen offers better image quality as well thanks to its tandem OLED tech (check out our explainer on why this is a big deal), but if you don’t need that additional image quality, which includes better contrast, higher brightness levels, and support for the Adobe RGB color gamut, and are just interested in the touchscreen, then essentially yeah, you’re paying $400 extra for it.

If you’re a professional, especially one in the creative industry, you’ll need to think long and hard if that investment is worth it. Meanwhile, the likes of the MacBook Air and MacBook Neo aren’t really used for complex creative tasks, and instead used for casual day-to-day use, where touchscreens are much more useful.

Granted, adding an extra $400 / £400 / AU$700 to the price of a MacBook Neo or MacBook Air wouldn’t be great, especially as they’ve just had a price bump earlier this year, but Apple wouldn’t need to include the OLED tech and advanced image-quality options included in the MacBook Pro. A touchscreen MacBook Neo for $899, say, could be a real hit, especially if Apple was to also keep the non-touchscreen model for people who still want the ultimate affordable way to get into the Mac ecosystem.

This isn’t just an Apple problem, of course. The new laptops powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC, which are aimed at the same creative professionals and heavy local AI users as the MacBook Pro (with similarly high price tags), come with touchscreens. I’ve spent a decent amount of time with each one at various events, and I found that the touchscreen was the least-used part of the laptop — in fact, I often forgot those laptops had one. Because there aren’t cheaper, non-touch, models, though I didn’t resent its inclusion.

As I said, I do get the appeal of touchscreen laptops, but I find the technology is best used in 2-in-1 devices where the keyboard can be flipped behind the screen (or removed entirely) so that it can be used as a tablet-like device.

In an ideal world, then, Apple would have put its touchscreen on an entirely new 2-in-1 MacBook, but I can’t see that happening any time soon. Apple sort of has a device like that — the powerful iPad Pro, which can be paired with a Magic Keyboard that turns it into a touchscreen laptop. The problem there, however, is that despite coming with Apple’s powerful M-series chips, the same you’ll find in MacBooks, the iPad Pro is limited to the iPadOS operating system and mobile apps.

Put macOS on that bad boy, however, and allow us to run full desktop applications on it, and hey presto: Apple has a touchscreen MacBook that utilizes the tech in a way that’s actually useful. Until then, I’ll stick with my standard MacBook Pro, and just try to remember not to prod it with my sausage fingers too often.

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