Touch on the Mac Sands Down Rough Edges
October 28, 2026
Why do so many people ask for built-in cellular support on the Mac? Macs already have cellular support via Personal Hotspot on your iPhone. It’s easy enough to enable via the Wi-Fi menu. So why keep asking for it?
Because it would be nicer. You wouldn’t have to connect to your phone each time you reopen your laptop. You wouldn’t need stare at a spinner for ten seconds waiting to connect, or wonder why your phone isn’t showing up at all.
A cellular modem in a Mac wouldn’t be a revolution. It would, however, sand down some of the rough edges of the user experience.
Now consider touch. One demo from today’s event involved an on-screen piano. The video was widely mocked on social media – who wants to play a piano on their Mac? The answer is no one, of course. It's neither comfortable nor ergonomic. But this misses the point. Nobody intends to create their next studio album by poking their sausage fingers at a laptop screen.
Suppose you’re an artist riding the subway. You’ve been struck with your next melody, and you need to record it quickly as it’s fleeting. Your instruments are at home, but you have your MacBook with you. Would you rather record it with your mouse by pointing and clicking each piano key? Or would you rather reach out and touch it?
Consider the iOS developer. You’re in a coffee shop when you receive a bug report about a gesture in your app’s user interface. Sure, you could fish your phone out of your bag, connect it to Xcode, load the app and test the fix. You already have the iOS Simulator running. Wouldn’t it be nice to test the fix there?
It’s not about doing new things. It’s about reducing friction, rounding off a few sharp corners in your workflow. Touch is to the Mac what the Apple Pencil is to the iPad. The pencil didn’t radically alter the iPad experience, and touch won’t radically alter the Mac.
This has been made clear in what Apple demonstrated today. Aside from a few UI affordances, macOS looks the same today as it did yesterday. If it were supposed to be a revolution along the lines of the click wheel or the mouse itself, we’d be looking at a much different macOS. But we’re not.