MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 17makes it look like the
odd man out, which
is a sad fate for a
company that’s usually
credited for making us
fall in love with
touchscreens in the
first place.
Also, Apple doesn’t
need to include multi-
touch support on every
MacBook, and if it’s
really so concerned
about precision, it
could limit support to
the larger notebooks
like the MacBook Pro. It
could even charge an extra $300 for the
feature, much as Apple was fond of doing for
the Touch Bar before it became standard. I’d
be willing to bet, though, that more people
would end up using a multi-touch MacBook
display instead of a Touch Bar.
Apple’s approach to Sidecar feels like
a relic of an older Apple: an Apple that
refused to let you use a mouse with an
iPad because the tablet wasn’t strictly
designed to work that way. Lately Apple
isn’t so stubborn. We can now use mice
with iPads (go.macworld.com/mcip), after
all, although only as an Accessibility
feature. We don’t have to buy specifically
designed “MFi” controllers to play games
on an iPhone: ordinary PlayStation 4 (go.
macworld.com/sps4) and Xbox One (go.
macworld.com/msx1) controllers will do.
And most remarkably of all, this year Apple
stopped trying to persuade the world to
embrace its “butterfly” keyboards and
instead equipped its new 16-inch MacBook
Pro with the scissor-switch keys of old.
After so many years of complaints and
a lack of interest, maybe in the years to
come Apple will ditch the Touch Bar
altogether and just let us interact with our
screens directly. As Sidecar and Luna
Display show, that leap needn’t be as
great as Apple is making it out to be.
And if nothing else, Apple? C’mon,
let us click on links in Sidecar with our
fingers. ■Touchscreens have become so common in some Windows laptops
like the Dell XPS 13 that the inclusion of one barely warrants news.