A touchscreen MacBook Air? Apple doesn’t sound convinced

The rumoured forthcoming touchscreen MacBook Pro laptop won’t lead to a cavalcade of touchscreen Macs, according to a well-connected Apple insider.

The Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman’s sources say there are currently no firm plans for another touchscreen Mac, meaning you probably shouldn’t be saving your pennies for a prod-able iMac or MacBook Air (and, by extension, a MacBook Neo) unless you’re ready to spring for the Pro. Hey isn’t it cool to have another MacBook classification to talk and speculate about! Woo!

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Apple hasn’t yet decided whether to bring the power of touch to anything beyond the Pro laptop due later this year. Gurman is short and sweet on the matter. In the most recent Power On Newsletter, he writes:

“At this point, Apple hasn’t decided whether to bring touch to any Macs beyond the MacBook Pro (a model that’s slated to arrive as early as at the end of this year).”

So… not ruling it out. But nothing in the pipeline? Not to put words in the good man’s mouth, but in Gurman-speak that probably means that touch coming to non-Pro Macs will be about five years away, if at all. Recent reports have suggested the touchscreen MacBook Pro mightn’t be the iPad hybrid people hoped for either.

Again, Gurman suggested that touch capabilities will be more of a “bonus” than the standout feature of the device. So, if you were thinking of a macOS device that’s effectively an iPad Pro glued to a MacBook keyboard, that mightn’t be the case. An issue of the PowerOn newsletter from earlier this month said the touchscreen will “stop well short” of a Mac-iPad hybrid model.

The report said there will be an ability to tap on screen elements, with controls then changing based upon the input method. Gurman uses the example of a user tapping the menu bar to launch a larger control panel designed for touch.