Apple’s chief design officer, Jony Ive revealed that Apple decided against adding touchscreens to the Mac years ago, according to an interview with CNET. The statement comes as most Windows-based OEMs have added touchscreen capabilities to their laptops.
When Apple started playing around with the idea of putting touchscreens on a Mac, it tried to find a proper use case scenario for it. However, it realized that touchscreens on Mac were not “particularly useful or a proper application of multi-touch.” Why?
For a bunch of practical reasons. It’s difficult to talk [laughs] without going into a lot of details that puts me starting to talk about things that we are working on. I don’t really want to talk much more about it.
Jony Ive is probably referring to the idea of Apple using an e-ink keyboard on the MacBook Pro in 2018. The e-ink keyboard will have the ability to change the letters and characters displays on each key.
Jony Ive also said that Apple explored a lot of designs and used them day-to-day only to realize that they were not compelling enough in regular use. He also said that Apple has worked on the Touch Bar since two years, though initially, it was not product specific. The first prototype was based around haptic-rich trackpads.
This was an area of combining touch and display-based inputs with a mechanical keyboard. That was the focus. We unanimously were very compelled by [the Touch Bar] as a direction, based on, one, using it, and also having the sense this is the beginning of a very interesting direction. But [it] still just marks a beginning.
When questioned on whether the company considers the emotional ties that many Mac users have with their devices while designing new products and models, Ive said that Apple does not “limit ourselves in how we will push — if it’s to a better place. What we won’t do is just do something different that’s no better.”
