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DS David Sparks On Mac Power Users

“I thought they were going to do something really cool with the operating system. Remember when they added the mouse support to the iPad, how they redid mouse support like you've never seen before, and the interface would kind of organically grow up around wherever the pointer was? It looks to me like they really didn't do that here. There's not a lot of affordance for touch on an interface that was never designed for touch.”

Mac Power Users · November 2026

“I thought they were going to do something really cool with the operating system. Remember when they added the mouse support to the iPad, how they redid mouse support like you've never seen before, and the interface would kind of organically grow up around wherever the pointer was? It looks to me like they really didn't do that here. There's not a lot of affordance for touch on an interface that was never designed for touch.” — David Sparks, Mac Power Users

Context

On the first touchscreen Mac, David's criticism is that macOS gained touch input without a rethought interface, unlike Apple's redesign of the pointer on iPad.

Transcript

Mac Power Users Around 28:24 into the episode
David Sparks

…there. I don't like hate the idea of it, but personally, it's not a feature that I would run out and buy a computer for. I would worry about like, I don't like fingerprints on my screen. It's like, how do you handle that? And, you know, what are we adding to the screen when we frequently touch it?

Stephen Robles

…plugin, you know, there are times when, man, it would be nice if I could just pinpoint on the dot. I mean, you can do that with the mouse, but if I could somehow like pinch to like make the waveform a little thinner and then like use the pencil maybe to move it around, maybe, maybe. I don't know.

David Sparks

Well, it is an improved screen in many ways. In addition to touch screen, it also has 2,000 nits of brightness, which is an improvement over the standard MacBook Pro screen. But again, I just, I have that. I have that MacBook and I don't really ever think it's not bright enough. But, you know, I'm sure there's some people that have use cases for it. One thought I had on the touch that I forgot to mention earlier is in my head, I thought they were going to do something really cool with the operating system. Like, remember when they added the mouse support to the iPad, how they kind of redid a mouse support like you've never seen before, you know, the trackpad support and the interface would kind of organically grow up around wherever the pointer was to make it easier to use. And just kind of like they took a whole new take on it. And it looks to me like they really didn't do that here. There's not a lot of affordance for touch on an interface that was never designed for touch.

Stephen Robles

Yeah, and you can like swipe up to get the dock like you would on an iPad. But if you're a Power Mac user, as you might be listening to this show, if your dock has a bunch of icons in it, you know, the tap targets are going to be very small.

David Sparks

Yeah. Or the menu bar. I mean, just think about that.

Stephen Robles

The menu bar. And, you know, macOS 27 added features that people have been thinking, like, oh, this is for the touchscreen MacBook Pro. And clearly it was, but like a pull down to refresh in Safari, which you can do right now in macOS 27. Drag your mouse, drag a web page down or scroll down all the…

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

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