14 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
MACUSER TOUCHSCREEN MACBOOKS AND SIDECARrigs aimed at creating works of art. The
model I see most often is a Dell Latitude
7480, which is basically an everyday
Windows “business” laptop apart from the
touchscreen support.
Apple, though, has long argued that
bringing touchscreen support to Macs
would require some kind of big overhaul
of macOS. In a 2016 interview with Wired
(go.macworld.com/part) about the Touch
Bar making the Mac a “part-time touch
experience,” Apple marketing chief Phil
Schiller said the idea of a touchscreen
Mac was “lowest common denominator
thinking” because you can’t optimize the
design of features like the menu bars oftext, or simply dropping
my cursor in the right
spot. If Sidecar let me
do these same things,
I’d love it more than I
already do.
LOSING TOUCH
I don’t think Apple
grasps this simple point.
It’s overthinking how
people would use
touchscreen laptops.
Apple seems to assume
users would want to use
nothing but touch
support on their
MacBooks, but when I
see colleagues and visitors using
touchscreen Windows laptops in meetings,
they’re not using them for complicated tasks
like clone-stamping textures in Photoshop.
They’re usually not diving deep into menus,
and they’re certainly not trying to recreate
one of Monet’s haystacks. Instead, they’re
usually standing over their laptops and
quickly swiping to different parts of a page
or opening files or links, thereby saving a
few seconds over what using a mouse or
the trackpad would have taken. It’s sure a
heck a lot more convenient than the Touch
Bar, which has been Apple’s only concession
to touch-based interaction on MacBooks to
date. And these aren’t part-time tablets or
A shot from my 12.9-inch iPad Pro running Sidecar. Apparently,
Apple thinks pressing the Touch Bar for Safari tabs (inside the red
oval) would be easier than just pressing the tabs in Safari? No.