Apple's VP Schiller sounds off on touch screen Macs


Phil Schiller quoted about adding multi-touch to the Mac in Steven Levi's column:

"We think of the whole platform," he says. "If we were to do Multi-Touch on the screen of the notebook, that wouldn't be enough -- then the desktop wouldn't work that way." And touch on the desktop, he says, would be a disaster. "Can you imagine a 27-inch iMac where you have to reach over the air to try to touch and do things? That becomes absurd." He also explains that such a move would mean totally redesigning the menu bar for fingers, in a way that would ruin the experience for those using pointer devices like the touch or mouse. "You can't optimize for both," he says. "It's the lowest common denominator thinking."

Where I think iOS succeeded where many other tablets failed is iOS wasn't a retooled version of a desktop OS. iOS was built from the ground up. Sure, iOS shared blocks with Mac OS X, but it was designed from the start to be a touch interface.

Another interesting tidbit about the Touch Bar:
When I suggested that this might be only the latest in a number of mobile innovations moving to the Mac, in an overall annexation of the Macintosh platform, Schiller pushed back, hard. "Its implementation is pure Mac," he said. "The thought and vision from the very beginning was not at all, 'How do we put iOS in the Mac?' It was entirely, 'How to you use the [iOS] technology to make a better Mac experience?'"

I'm not sure i'm totally buying this because we've seen a lot of UX concepts come over to the Mac from iOS. The Touch Bar is bringing even hardware with essentially is watchOS embedded into the Mac. So, this may just be a manner of perspective where users see convergence of existing functionality between platforms, but Apple sees repurposing of skills and tech to do something enhance and extend platforms.