Oct 30, 2021 17:15:00

Explaining why Apple doesn't include touchscreens or Face ID on Macs

At

a new product announcement event held in October 2021, Apple announced the new ' MacBook Pro ' equipped with M1 Pro/Max . The 2021 model MacBook Pro has several changes, including an increase in I/O ports and the elimination of the unpopular Touch Bar . On the other hand, the touch screen and facial recognition function ``Face ID'' that are already used in Windows-based PCs are not installed in Macs. John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, told the Wall Street Journal why Apple doesn't include touch screens or Face ID on Macs.

Apple explains why it hasn't added a touchscreen or Face ID to the Mac - 9to5Mac
https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/29/apple-touchscreen-mac-interview-ipad/

There are many Chromebooks and Windows-powered notebook PCs that use touch screens, but Apple does not use touch screens for Macs at the time of article creation.

Regarding this, Ternus said, ``We are building the world's best touch computer on the iPad, so you can say that the iPad is fully optimized for touch interaction. 'The iPad is fully optimized for indirect input (from the keyboard rather than the keyboard), so we don't see any reason to change these compositions.' It claims to be optimized for 'keyboard input'.

The display of the new MacBook Pro has a narrower bezel, but a notch (a cutout at the top of the display) that is familiar to iPhones and iPads has been added. The notch is a design feature that appeared when Face ID was added to the iPhone, so there were expectations that Face ID would be added to the new MacBook Pro, but it is not installed. It remains the fingerprint authentication function Touch ID.

Tom Boger, Apple's vice president of iPad product marketing, believes that Touch ID is a better fit than Face ID for the MacBook form factor, saying, ``Your hands are already on the keyboard, so you can I think it would be more convenient for MacBooks to have Touch ID placed here.'

Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal also points out that when repairing a MacBook, it would cost several hundred dollars (tens of thousands of yen) to use an independent repair company instead of using Apple's official repair service. pointed out that savings can be made. However, this is only if the independent repairer has the parts and information necessary to perform the repair. In response to this current situation, Mr. Stern argued that ``Apple should be given more rights to repair, '' but Mr. Boger only said that ``Apple is continuing to work hard in that area.'' did not say much about what actions it plans to take in the future regarding the right to repair.

What is the 'right to repair' required to solve the problem of Apple product repair costs being too high? -GIGAZINE

In addition, when the Wall Street Journal pointed out that ``MacBook Pro cannot be expanded with memory after purchase,'' Boger and Ternus said that the ` `Unified Memory Architecture '' installed in Mac improves performance. He said that he was buying it all at once, and there was no need to add more memory.