Rumors have persisted for years now that Apple is working on a touchscreen MacBook, but I’ve never been truly convinced. For one thing, I don’t see how a touchscreen could improve my MacBook experience enough to justify the inevitable price rise. This is Apple we’re talking about, after all, and there’s just no way that a touchscreen MacBook will possibly come cheap.
As well as that, I’ve long agreed with Steve Jobs’ belief that adding a touchscreen to a regular MacBook is an ergonomic nightmare. Constantly reaching up to the display is a quick way to exhaust your arms, and paining its users isn’t really part of Apple’s playbook. The Mac operating system isn’t designed for touch either, and in any case, adding a touchscreen would result in all manner of greasy fingerprints on your monitor. It’s never seemed like a good idea to me.
But there’s another possibility that, I admit, I’ve never given much thought to: a MacBook with a foldable screen. That’s been bandied about for a while now, and it’s recently been rumoured again in a research note from Apple analyst Jeff Pu.
According to Pu, Apple is working on a foldable iPhone with a 7.8-inch inner display. It’s also developing a larger foldable with an 18.8-inch screen, he claims, that will run macOS and be a sort of MacBook-iPad hybrid.
Piquing my interest
This latter device intrigues me. It could fold out flat to become a large tablet, or fold at a right angle and be used as a laptop. That would mean you get a great deal of flexibility to transform it into the device you need at any given moment, from rendering videos or designing a presentation on a Mac to crafting illustrations or playing games on an iPad.
In that case, a touchscreen seems like a great idea. It would enable the device’s tablet mode yet wouldn’t necessarily an integral part of the Mac experience. You could essentially opt out of getting sore arms while using the MacBook, yet you’d still get the touchscreen experience in tablet mode.
This device has been rumored many times before from reliable sources, with specifics like its 18.8-inch display leaking out previously. Perhaps it’s the latest confirmation from Pu that has finally opened my eyes to the possibilities of this device.
I’m not saying I’m going to rush out and buy one right away when it arrives. As I mentioned earlier, this device will command a hefty price premium, and I’m not sure I would benefit from it enough to justify that extra outlay. But as a tech geek, I’m feeling a renewed curiosity for what might be possible with this product.
Key concerns
All that said, I still have plenty of concerns. For one thing, if this device is going to have a tablet mode, that almost certainly means its laptop component will lose its physical keyboard in order to not obstruct the tablet screen. That means a virtual keyboard that appears on the device’s flat glass.
Try typing directly on an iPad’s on-screen keyboard and you’ll see how much of a bad experience this can be. Poor feedback and a lack of travel mar the whole thing, and the lack of physical keys makes it easy to press the wrong key unless you stare at the keyboard instead of your content.
This will be a key problem for Apple to solve. The company has a few ideas up its sleeve, including haptic feedback and a deformable keyboard, but I’m not entirely convinced. By releasing this hybrid device, Apple can’t afford to degrade the MacBook experience in the process, which a virtual keyboard might do.
As well as that, I’m unsure how well suited to macOS the tablet form will be. Despite endless chatter from tech pundits and customers, Apple hasn’t merged iPadOS and macOS because the two systems have their own use cases and key differences. If this new product combines Mac and iPad hardware but uses only Mac software, does that mean the tablet will lose out?
Regardless of these questions, one thing is clear: this foldable device has piqued my interest. It has been rumoured before, but for some reason I’ve never considered that it could be the ideal way to add a touchscreen to a Mac without ruining the experience for everyone.
Pu believes it could launch in 2026 or 2027, but knowing Apple, the former seems a little early. Regardless, it might not be too long until I’m converted to the idea of a touchscreen Mac. I’m not counting my chickens yet, but I’m certainly intrigued.
