Wherefore art thou Macintosh?
The future is not touch. The future is mobile. Mobile is constrained to using touch interfaces, or even more precisely, mobile is constrained to using <i>touch interface on the active screen</i> (as opposed to the touch interface of a trackpad or something). Mobile did not choose this, it was forced on it because there is no other choice. There&#x27;s no room to put any other input devices on the phone itself, and nobody is going to carry around extra mice or something. (We could <i>barely</i> get some people to use styluses that fit in the device itself.)<p>It&#x27;s weird to hear people waxing poetic about touch nowadays, because now that we&#x27;ve all been using touch interfaces for several years, we all should be realizing that they aren&#x27;t necessarily that awesome. We&#x27;ve all by now used a map app that, as nice as the touch interface was, just didn&#x27;t quite gel in terms of whether we were zooming, panning, twisting, or trying to select a single location. We should all be able to observe that the act of using a touch interface also means that we must block the line-of-sight to that same interface, meaning both that the touch thing we are interacting with can&#x27;t feed back in the most natural place to do so, and that touch interfaces must be very large to accommodate the lack of precision. We must all have dealt with the accidental dialing brought on by the touch interface that can&#x27;t distinguish between fingers and buttocks, or the stray emails we deleted in the act of simply picking up our phone, or the accidental order placed when we tried to clean a drop of water or a speck of dust off the screen. And I don&#x27;t care how good you are with that touch keyboard, you&#x27;d be better on something that could have custom-built haptic feedback, and ideally, haptic feedback you can &quot;feel&quot; without triggering inputs, too. Touch screens are still the best solution for mobile, but they are clearly not &quot;all that&quot;.<p>From this point of view, where mobile is the future but touch just happens to be along for that ride, bodging touch on to a laptop isn&#x27;t that impressive and there&#x27;s no reason to believe it&#x27;s the wave of the future. I&#x27;ve actually <i>got</i> &quot;touch&quot; on my laptop, in the form of my trackpad, and for a 2D slab, I get rather a lot of distinct inputs out of it. Remember that everything I can use that for comfortably is one more opportunity that I don&#x27;t need a &quot;touchbar&quot; for. (That&#x27;s been my real criticism of the touchbar; it&#x27;s not necessarily intrinsically a bad idea or fundamentally useless, it&#x27;s that the list of things for which it is the <i>best solution</i> is rather short. And I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s <i>empty</i>... just <i>short</i>. In particular, it&#x27;s much shorter than the list of things that it <i>could</i> be used for, but for which it&#x27;s not the best solution.)<p>Further, despite not particularly wanting it the laptop I&#x27;m typing this on has a full touchscreen. Mostly I remember this when I go to clean the screen of some bit of dust and my mouse cursor starts jumping around. I don&#x27;t need it for much. Even when acquiring a button on the screen, the touchpad is faster than removing my hand from the keyboard and clicking. My touchpad already has several useful gestures, draining away the marginal utility of other touch interfaces. It&#x27;s not that useful, even though it&#x27;s sitting right in front of me. Now, it&#x27;s not a 2-in-1, where I can at least see the use case, but, neither is the new Mac, right? It&#x27;s just not <i>that</i> useful. Not <i>useless</i>, but not very useful.<p>It&#x27;s not touch that&#x27;s the future, it&#x27;s mobile. The still-not-yet-mature-but-still-inevitable &quot;mobile phone that docks to a desktop and provides its guts&quot; will be a hybrid device, and the &quot;touchiness&quot; is irrelevant.<p>(Actually, now that I think of it this way, the Nintendo Switch may be the closest thing to a successful implementation of that I&#x27;ve seen in a while. Perhaps if that succeeds, it&#x27;ll open the doors to computer versions of that idea.)