Apple is doubling down on its two OS strategy.

Tim Cook, as quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald:

“We don’t believe in sort of watering down one for the other. Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two … you begin to make trade offs and compromises…”

As someone who just wrote a thousand-plus word piece on the glories of menu bars and the difficulty of bringing them to touch-based interfaces, I couldn’t agree more. People like to point out Windows 10’s support for both touch and mouse input, but I’d argue that Windows is still primarily a pointer drive interface with support for touch carefully tacked on. That said and while I still believe that touch in Windows leads to a disjointed user experience, I am also beginning to wonder if excluding touch input entirely from Mac laptops might end up being a hill not worth dying on. Take this tweet from John Siracusa that shows a photo of a monitor with the sticker “NOT A TOUCH SCREEN” and poses the question “How long until MacBooks need a similar sticker?”

If touch is becoming the default, and that seems to be the case especially for younger generations, then I would argue that not including basic touch support in Macs is potentially more damaging than a disjointed user experience. Consider someone whose entire experience with modern computing has exclusively involved touch enabled devices. Then imagine that same someone is presented with a laptop where they instinctively smudge the screen to scroll the content. Now I don’t like smudged screens, but if the laptop is a modern PC, that smudge at least comes with the satisfaction of having scrolled the content in the same way as everywhere else. If the laptop is a Mac however, all we’re left with is the smudge.¹