>THE SHIFT
Change is coming to Apple’s notebooks, and david chartier says the new Touch Bar shows us the direction
The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar? I think something major this way comes…
WE OFTEN hear how Apple is an iterative company. It plots and plans, they say, and rolls out new ideas and technologies in a gradual, deliberate process in order to train us for what’s coming next. I believe this is what’s happening with the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. I think something major this way comes.
Think about the first iPhone in 2007 – no App Store, no copy or paste, no App Extensions, no Document Providers, no iMessage... not even multitasking or folders. Year after year, Apple rolled out a couple of the features we now take for granted, trying not to hit us with too much too quickly. The little details can ebb and flow, but there was always a greater vision, a course plotted.
Now think about the Touch Bar. A replacement for the whole Function key bar, the Touch Bar can display basic buttons, rich color palettes, music- and photo-editing tools, you name it. As a sign of its commitment, Apple highlighted new Touch Bar features and controls for nearly all of its own apps. Clearly, it’s been working on this for a while.
I believe the Touch Bar represents the start of something significant – a set of training wheels for a major new shift, this time for notebooks and possibly even traditional desktop computers. Reading between the lines of recent interviews with Apple execs like Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, and Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, I believe Apple is preparing us for a new kind of desktop, laptop, and/or other type of computing experience that incorporates touch and contextual interfaces at its core.
If we speculate about the next step after the Touch Bar, it seems pretty clear to me that a multitouch, color trackpad in MacBooks could be next. Apple already spent the last couple years turning it into glass, removing the physical movement, and adding 3D Touch and haptic feedback – the foundation is all there, now it just needs to turn into a screen.
But what about the keyboard? Well, new MacBooks have a much thinner keyboard with keys that travel far less than any other MacBook, and touchscreen typing is becoming the norm for a new generation of customers, an increasing number which have grown up touchscreen-first and, in some cases, touchscreen-only. After the trackpad takes the next step into touch, something like a touch-based, haptic-powered keyboard that is also a contextual, multitouch display doesn’t seem too far-fetched anymore.
The last piece of this puzzle is the software that will power it all. macOS has too much core design centered around mouse pointers and clunky file systems. It would be something entirely new – not iOS scaled up for desktops, and not macOS with bolted on touch-based options. Something built to fit the needs of a new kind of computer.