Post by @zzt@mas.to

oh no sorry, apparently it was very difficult to make the touchscreen macbook, a device that apple has prototyped in various forms for over a decade, because it was very hard to make a multitouch version of AppKit, a thing that already exists for iOS

please ignore all of my past and future posts about how fucking lazy the touchscreen macbook is as a concept and implementation and how apple didn’t do it before because it’s a horribly flawed interface on every other laptop I have with a touchscreen (they’re really cheap used), and those have the ability to fold into janky tablet mode and use a stylus, two things the new macbook can’t do

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@zzt@mas.to 2 hr. ago

it’s really easy to be ceo: just figure out which projects your predecessor shelved for being shit and rush those to market

if they’re still shit, just have what remains of your OS team crunch on some utterly use case brained functionality for the fucking thing, like playing a tiny onscreen piano keyboard while your wrists develop carpal tunnel or touching the screen of an emulated iPhone in a way the actual users of your app wouldn’t

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@zzt@mas.to 2 hr. ago

god I’m gonna get the remaining Apple employees I haven’t blocked subtooting this one too huh

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@zzt@mas.to 2 hr. ago

I’m cribbing from @fasterandworse for this one and I know some people will disagree but:

there appears to be nothing new about the touchscreen macbook other than a limitation of purpose: they decided that instead of making the touchscreen a global feature, it should be an intentionally limited interface

that isn’t always a bad thing! CarPlay and Android Auto are successful task-specific interfaces with extremely specific use cases in mind

unfortunately, none of the use cases presented for the touchscreen macbook are particularly interesting. this is what I mean when I call it something like “the most use case device ever designed”: they’re begging you to find an interesting use case for the functionality that justifies the product.

for devices where functionality is intentionally limited, there’s a thin line between success and failure. there’s lots of cozy devices that let you focus on thing X (usually writing) that seem great… but they’re often expensive and janky

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@zzt@mas.to 2 hr. ago

again @fasterandworse has said these words in a more elegant way than I can as a non-designer, but there are many intentionally limited devices whose use case is better served by a more generalist device

a lot of cozy writing devices really are just a text editor running as a window manager, a thing you can do yourself for free

the more general device that does what the touchscreen macbook does is an iphone or an ipad, and that might seem counterintuitive. how is a locked down idevice more general than a computer? but the computer on offer can’t be controlled fully via touch. you will constantly be switching between the touchpad and the touch screen, assuming you use the touchscreen at all after a week. the touchscreen on the new macbook is a much less general, much more limited device than any other touchscreen apple has ever made.

I don’t see the ingredients here needed to make for a successful task-limited device