DP David Pierce Editor-at-large at The Verge who covers consumer technology and product reviews, and writes the Installer newsletter of recommendations.

“…you will use it three times a day for a grand total of two seconds, right? … The person who needs this, and there are people who need it, 100% guaranteed already owns an iPad. This is not a use case that exists for somebody who doesn't already own an iPad.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

Context

The hosts were discussing what 'optimized for touch' means on Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro. David argues the touchscreen is a minor convenience, and that people who would really use touch already own an iPad.

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Transcript

The Vergecast Around 29:57 into the episode

David Pierce

and that's all very ipady right the idea that if i press and hold on something it sort of expands to fill more space yeah

Speaker 2

…be testing something testing your app and like then you can you have the iphone display right there like in the test and then you're just like tapping on it and doing it right there it's like ah okay also very cool example not the things that people the most people are gonna do but you know useful

David Pierce

…in the same place, the more productive and efficient you can be. And so I think for Apple to look at this and say, okay, this is a thing you're going to do very occasionally in very small amounts is all fine and good. And then I look at like the demo of the person playing the piano on a MacBook and I'm just like, well, A, no one's ever going to do this. This is nothing. This demo is nothing. The person who needs this, and there are people who need it, 100% guaranteed already owns an iPad. This is not a use case that exists for somebody who doesn't already own an iPad. And so that's the part where it's like, maybe this is just Apple feeling like it has to explain the sort of nth degree of what this could be. But it sounds like even the stuff that's being optimized is basically like really tiny visual changes and accept multiple inputs at a time. So you can use 10 fingers instead of one cursor. That might be as far as this ever needs to go in order to be…

Speaker 4

Yeah. And I mean, it's possible. And it would, I think it would make sense then as to like why Apple's so like stringent about like, if you want a pencil, that you buy

Speaker 2

an iPad. You know, it's like, it's, it goes back to like the whole like, you know, buy your mom an iPhone thing, right? The way the way that they try to like separate everything. And yeah, it's to get you to buy more stuff and all that stuff too. But like, I understand why like they want to keep…

David Pierce

That one, that's a really interesting example. I would also put that on the list of doesn't matter, no one's ever going to do it. It's just the idea that somebody who is a sophisticated enough computer user to use spotlight is going to think that the best thing for them to do is take their hands…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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