Ternus addresses Apple breaking touchscreen Mac taboo: ‘Who knew?’

In an interview with WIRED, Apple executives including CEO John Ternus, hardware chief Johny Srouji, and marketing chief Greg “Joz” Joswiak discussed the company’s decision to bring touch to the Mac. Here are the details.

Apple execs discuss touch about-face

For years, online commenters countered rumors of touchscreen Macs with quotes from Steve Jobs and other Apple executives, including Phil Schiller, arguing that touchscreens had no place on the Mac.

Shortly after Apple announced the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, journalist Steven Levy published an interview with Apple executives in WIRED discussing the company’s decision to reverse its longstanding stance on touchscreen Macs.

I ask if Apple is about to break a long-imposed taboo and introduce a Macintosh with a touch screen.

Ternus beams. “Who knew?”

In the interview, Ternus notes that while indirect input through the trackpad and keyboard remains central to the Mac experience, “there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.”

He also stresses that Apple sees touch as an add-on, rather than a feature that should require compromises to the MacBook Pro’s design.

Throughout the interview, much of Apple’s reasoning for finally bringing touch to the Mac revolves around the fact that it reworked and developed several hardware and software components to make touch possible without compromising the Mac experience.

From WIRED:

“We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn’t make the product lesser in any way. It didn’t make it heavier. It didn’t make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we’ve ever put into a Mac,” Ternus told me. “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”

As for Srouji, he argued that advances in technology over the past decade had finally made it possible for Apple to meet its standards for a touchscreen Mac.

That included custom silicon, a redesigned thermal system to keep the display from feeling hot to the touch, and a reworked hinge to minimize screen wobble when users interact with it.

“Ten years is a very, very long time,” says Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “Many things have changed, whether it’s the display technology, the custom silicon, et cetera.” Eventually, he told me, the confluence of chips, display tech, and software architecture “met our bar.” “I like my engineers to be gated by physics, not imagination or timelines,” he says.

Joz, in turn, noted that part of Apple’s decision was driven by a new generation of touch-first users who expect to interact directly with their screens:

“Most pros own an iPad, and almost every pro owns an iPhone,” Joswiak says. “So this is something that they’re natural with. There’s a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch.”

He added that professional users, including “engineers, scientists, software developers, and media creators,” had also been asking Apple to bring touch to the Mac.

The full interview also touches on (no pun intended) how Apple adapted macOS for touchscreen interactions, the new gestures for Dynamic Island, and whether touch might eventually make its way to other Macs. You can read it in full here.

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