Apple is adding touch to Macs as customers come to expect it

In 2011, a dad in Paris filmed his 1-year-old daughter trying to swipe a paper magazine like it was an iPad. That baby is 16 now. Kids like her are the reason Apple is putting a touchscreen on the Mac this Wednesday, after two decades of refusing to. And she was pretty normal for her age. In 2011, fewer than 1% of American kids under 8 had their own tablet. Six years later it was 42%. The oldest of those kids turn 17 this year, which means they're about to go buy their first real laptop. Gurman reports Tim Cook and John Ternus both felt customers had started to expect touch on a Mac, while Apple's own industrial design team stayed against it. I keep coming back to that word, expect. Somebody trained that expectation into people, and Apple did most of the training. Then those kids got to…

Apple to Unveil Touch MacBook Pro After Two Decades of Resistance // Will be interesting to see how this "modality" functions. In general modes have a tricky problem where having a manual switch is something tech enthusiasts like (like a convertible car or unfolding phone) but humans in daily use rarely want to put this much thought into using something or find it inconvenient. OTOH, automagically switching modes when there is a cost and complexity to switching wrong means that the pick will be wrong some percentage > 0% and that means it will feel like it is wrong all the time. In Windows 8 we were criticized for having two modes but there was no switch and touch worked as well as we could make it work with legacy apps in a desktop environment. There were APIs and design guidelines that…