16 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
MACUSER TOUCHSCREEN MACBOOKS AND SIDECARSidecar itself. Whenever you pull up a
Mac app in the Sidecar window running
on an iPad, you’ll get the Touch Bar
options you’d expect on a MacBook
along the bottom or top of the screen.
This makes it easy to see that the Touch
Bar options for things like bolding and
italicizing in an app like Microsoft Word
aren’t significantly larger than you’ll see in
the actual Word document above, so I
see little reason why you couldn’t just
press them in the Word document itself.
GETTING IN TOUCH
The existence of Sidecar also complicates
the argument that touchscreens aren’t
ergonomic for Macs, as Apple’s software
engineering chief Craig Federighi said to
Wired (go.macworld.com/crfd) not long
after last year’s WWDC.
“We really feel that the ergonomics of
using a Mac are that your hands are
rested on a surface, and that lifting your
arm up to poke a screen is a pretty
fatiguing thing to do.”
Yes, maybe this makes sense in the
context of a large-screened device like an
iMac. But on a MacBook—a device that’s
meant to be portable, much like an iPad?
That’s silly. Think of it this way—“lifting up
your arm to poke a screen” represents the
entirety of the iPad experience when
you’re using Apple’s Smart Keyboard or
any other keyboard case. And I haven’t
seen Apple stop selling Smart Keyboards
on that account.
(This is also a good spot to address the
idea that Apple would never design a
MacBook that allows you to grub up the
pretty screen with your fingerprints:
Doesn’t the entire iPad and iPhone
experience involve that? At any rate, my
MacBook’s screen seems prone to getting
dirty even when I don’t touch it.)
In the same interview, Federighi said
he regards all the touchscreen laptops out
there as “experiments.”
“I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the
other guys to date and said, how fast can
we get there?” he said.
But what is the Touch Bar, if not an
experiment? And if it is, it’s a failed one.
Apple’s boldest ideas tend to be
trendsetters despite initial protests—
consider smartphone notches,
smartphones without headphone jacks,
and USB-C laptops—but no other laptop
maker has made a serious effort to bring a
Touch Bar-like feature to their own device.
Touchscreen laptops, though, are
becoming more and more common.
They’re becoming the norm even in
popular traditional laptops like the Dell XPS
13 (go.macworld.com/d739). They may be
experiments, but they’re experiments that
other companies and users have found
successful and desirable—much unlike the
Touch Bar. At this point, Apple’s resistance