// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Hands-on with Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Apple is finally tackling the challenge of ‘ergonomically terrible’ touchscreen laptops.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Steve Jobs famously called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible,” and for over a decade, Apple stridently refused to make one. Today that all changes with the MacBook Pro — the company’s first laptop to embrace a touch interface. While it’s unlikely that Apple can fix all the “terrible” ergonomics of having to lift your arm up and touch a laptop screen, the company has put some effort into making macOS more touch-friendly.
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display weighs just 3 pounds, which is noticeably lighter than the current generation of non-touch MacBook Pros, which start at 3.4 pounds for the newly introduced M6 models. The difference is even bigger when you jump to the 16-inch model, which clocks in at 4 pounds, while the M5 Pro version without a touchscreen is 4.7. When picking up the 16-inch, you immediately notice the newfound lightness. It still has heft, but it feels better balanced when picking it up from a corner with one hand. Putting it side-by-side with a current 16-inch MacBook Pro, you see that it’s slightly thinner and has a footprint a smidge smaller. Aside from that, the feel of the materials is just like the MacBook Pros we’ve had for several years now.
Also exciting is the return of the glowing Apple logo. It’s a seemingly minor feature, but one that definitely got the audience excited during the introduction, and marks the return of a bit of flair to the MacBook lineup which, let’s be fair, has grown a bit utilitarian-looking over the years. Like the illuminated lid logo from years back, its brightness matches your screen, so it dims and can be fully turned off.
Touch works almost exactly like you’d expect it to with Apple’s first-party apps. You can swipe directly on the screen to scroll through websites, pinch to zoom, and double-tap to maximize a window. Some third-party apps might need to be updated to take advantage, but they shouldn’t be completely useless since macOS simply translates taps to clicks as a fallback. That said, anyone who has tried to “click” a tiny button in an app with their finger knows it’s a pretty fiddly experience at best, and infuriating at worst.