Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops? I've never really been drawn to wanting to do that. My mouse is far more accurate and doesn't block my view. But maybe it's just because I don't have it and I would find tons of uses for it. Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen. I guess I can understand for testing iOS/iPad apps but past that I just don't see myself wanting to use that.

Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.

Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.

No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.

Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.

I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a couple of years ago for my linux laptop and had been using it for months before I realized when I was wiping a smudge off of the monitor that it was a touch display! It was quite the surprise. I have yet to find it of any value.

Yes. I have my dock/taskbar on the side and to switch between apps it's like having a small touchbar I actually know the functions of at any time. When I want to scroll too or tap quickly on something on the other side of the screen, it's often more worth to lift my fingers away from the keyboard to touch the screen without even moving the pointer. But if you're not used to it you probably don't see the burden of moving your pointer away to then bring it back to the center of the screen.

Another possible use is when I want to show some page or content to someone, I always prefer manipulating it with my fingers, instead of "remotely" control it from the trackpad and a mouse.

And if it has stylus support it's cool for drawing (like my current laptop) but Macs do not have a hinge suited for that I think (no 360° support and their focus on a "weak hinge" for the weird and useless obsession from tech content creators of being able to lift the hinge with one finger, something I actually not really value because I sometimes wish that the hinge was stronger and sometimes weaker).

Finally there are also multitouch apps like the piano shown on the presentation and iPad apps I guess, but on macOS I think this matters less (Mac apps are not made with this in mind at all, iPad apps are limited).

I can’t be the only one who recoils in horror at the thought of TOUCHING THE SCREEN! It’s like going to the toilet and not washing your hands after. I’m sure people do it, but..ew.

In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.

I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.

To me it’s something that Apple could be providing for almost zero cost with zero downside to people who don’t want to use it and they’ve just refused to do so for almost no reason.

Odd feature omissions in Apple-land get debated endlessly just because there are so many random things that Apple arbitrarily decides you can’t do, and the marketing excuse we get is that they’re being intentional or holistic.

As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.

As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.

Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)

Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.

Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).

Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.

It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.

I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.

Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.

But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.

I'm not the target for this particular product either and you and I use our MBPs in pretty much identical ways. I will say though, if the laptop's hinge allowed reverse clamshell like the Yoga, then I would consider the premium for a feature I would rarely use. I like the idea of a tablet, but any time I'm seated with one, I'm either doing something I'd do on my phone or doing something that I'd rather be doing on my computer running a desktop OS.

Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!

My work laptop has a touchscreen. I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.

For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.

I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.

Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.

To be honest, I'm more often than not more concerned about not having smudges on my laptop's screen.

I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.

Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.

I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.

Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.

> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops

My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.

Every once in a while when I'm not in my right mind I reach out to my MBP screen and almost begin to pinch zoom something until I notice and recoil at the horror of potential fingerprints. This tells me that 1) we're all now smartphone-brained and this is the new default and 2) there's no fucking way I'm going to consciously want this.

Non-touchscreen laptops are an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

I have a Windows laptop with touchscreen and pen support and I like it (HP Omnibook, Lunar Lake). My top use case is probably holding the hinge of the laptop in a way that one thumb can reach the screen, and I scroll with it. Revolutionary I know! Sometimes reaching up and tapping a button (large target) is faster than using the touchpad. Signing documents with the pen. A 360° hinge helps, too, for tent mode and everything in between. Touch is easier on an airplane when space is tight for my arms.

I can and do live without it on other devices (my desktop PC), but it's a nice addition that should just be standard equipment everywhere.

It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.

However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed

Maybe this is the reason they doing it now

I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.

It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so desired.

I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.

I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.

the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing

I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts

I use a stylus to take lecture notes and solve problem sheets on my ThinkPad X13. Xournalpp works ok, Ubuntu 24.04, though there was a mutter bug that I had Sol patch out. Only better than paper because of data storage, honestly carrying a notebook is lighter than the usb c second display I use.

When I have it folded, it's intuitive to use the touchscreen like a tablet. But I wouldn't want to run the i3 setup I have on my desktop. The Wayland UI bandwagon and huge touch targets are for something after all.

Sometimes tapping a button is easier or faster than grabbing my mouse and navigating over to it but it is pretty infrequent.

I never thought I would but then I got a laptop with a touchscreen and I used it pretty often. You kind of just naturally end up using it.

Scrolling is a great reason for touchscreens on laptop, you can just swipe and down on your screen which is much more natural than two finger gesturing or grabbing a scrollbar.

My boss wont have a non touchscreen laptop purely for ease of scrolling up and down reports and around spreadsheets

It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.

I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).

A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...

Touch is really nice UX modality.

But it sucks to use application designed for mouse with touch.

So it's not that "touch is bad UX modality" it's "applications should be designed for touch as first class citizen" and by design I mean _proper_ design as in from the ground up not just prettier colors and slihgtly tweaked layout.

It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.

A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.

I use an 11" iPad with the keyboard/trackpad case pretty extensively and it works pretty naturally to move between keyboard/trackpad and touch.

This includes a lot of remoting into Windows machines (using Jump) where I use the trackpad more, but the touch is still really nice to have.

It's expectation. Think of all the screens in your life that you interact with and when you can't touch them it feels broken (at least to me). So I don't use my laptop as a tablet but when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button. Or I'm helping someone with a task and reaching to move a window directly is natural.

So it is just table stakes at this point.

I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.

I use it constantly. No one actually holds their hands up to the screen for extended periods of time. But touching the screen to click a button can be more efficient than tabbing or mousing to it. Especially if the laptop is on your lap.

Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.

I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.

I have a touchscreen ThinkPad. As an instructor, I found it useful to draw on slides with the pen. I rarely touch it otherwise.

I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.

I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.

The only reason I would want touch is if the screen would fold and rotate in order to turn it into a tablet. If Apple made this in a 12-inch format (like their old 12-inch MacBook I'd buy it immediately.

No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!

I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.

I actually disable touch screen in bios on my Dell XPS13 because I don't like touching it accidentally but then I'm not the target market for a touchscreen laptop.

I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.

It's great for convertibles, but less useful for regular laptops. One great use case is mobile app development, though.

I use the touch screen on my Panasonic Toughbook: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...

I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)

The Thinkpad I got years ago accidentally came with a touchscreen (I looked for other specs and totally missed that part). I've never used it.

I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.

I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.

> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops?

Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.

I have a surface pro 4 and absolutely like touch. The combination of an actual keyboard and touch is very efficient.

Only use case I can think of is using the iPhone simulator right from the Mac’s screen instead of having to send to iPhone

I like some of the 2-in-1 devices that come with a pen - Surface Pro type devices or ones with a 360 degree hinge.

But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.

My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.

Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:

> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”

> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.

I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...

I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.

All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.

Every time I hand my wife my laptop to show her something, her first instinct is to touch the screen to make it scroll. I think for a lot of people, having a device that doesn't respond to touch is weird.

(Like most millennials, she grew up with computers and even works on a desktop every day; there's something about the medium that makes her think "this has a touch screen".)

I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.

When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.

I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.

While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.

If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.

Always have and always will love having a touchscreen on a laptop.

At this point it's a huge loss to not have it on a display. Don't like it? Then shut up and don't use it. Don't yuck others' yum.

I always look for a way to disable it

I hate it. It's beyond me why people would intentionally smudge their laptop display.

I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).

Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.

I don’t have a dedicated tablet, and use a touchscreen laptop that’s “folded back” in lieu of that. It’s not as good but cheaper than two devices. To me it’s inherently a budget tool. An €3300 touchscreen laptop doesn’t really compute.

I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.

It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.

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These comments are LLM-tier now, if not LLM-generated already.

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Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?

I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.

Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.

But that's just me, I'm a simple guy. Like and subscribe!

"""

> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.

Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.

So this device would not be for me either.