

"Our instincts were that it didn't, but, what the heck, we could be wrong-so our teams worked on that for a number of times over the years," says Schiller. "It's the lowest common denominator thinking."Apple came to this conclusion by testing if touch screens made sense on the Mac. "Can you imagine a 27-inch iMac where you have to reach over the air to try to touch and do things? That becomes absurd." He also explains that such a move would mean totally redesigning the menu bar for fingers, in a way that would ruin the experience for those using pointer devices like the touch or mouse.

"If we were to do Multi-Touch on the screen of the notebook, that wouldn't be enough - then the desktop wouldn't work that way." And touch on the desktop, he says, would be a disaster. "We think of the whole platform," he says.
Apple mac touch screen computer pro#
Steven Levy, speaking again with Phil Schiller, this time for Wired in 2016 following the release of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar instead of a touch screen: These two worlds are different on purpose, and that's a good thing - we can optimize around the best experience for each and not try to mesh them together into a least-common-denominator experience."
Apple mac touch screen computer mac os#
The Mac OS has been designed from day one for an indirect pointing mechanism.

"iOS from its start has been designed as a multi-touch experience - you don't have the things you have in a mouse-driven interface, like a cursor to move around, or teeny little 'close' boxes that you can't hit with your finger. Steven Levy, speaking with Apple's Senior Vice President of Marketing, Phil Schiller, for Wired:įrom the ergonomic standpoint we have studied this pretty extensively and we believe that on a desktop scenario where you have a fixed keyboard, having to reach up to do touch interfaces is uncomfortable," says Schiller. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator but y'know, those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. I think anything can be forced to converge, but the problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. In the case of the multitouch Mac, the company has said just as much over the years.Īpple's CEO, Tim Cook, during Apple's April 2012 financial results call, as transcribed by Macworld:
