To double-check this assumption, Apple conducted user tests with touchscreens on Mac. “What the heck, we could be wrong,” Schiller told me then. “We’ve absolutely come away with the belief that it isn’t the right thing to do. Our instincts were correct.”
When I met with Apple executives Johny Srouji and Greg Joswiak this week to discuss the touchscreen MacBook Pro, you bet I invoked Schiller’s list of concerns. (Apple’s reps chose not to make Schiller, who now holds the title of “Apple Fellow,” available for an interview. In fact, they laughed when I asked.) It wasn’t only Schiller drawing a red line. In 2021, Ternus told journalist Joanna Stern, “The Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven’t really felt a reason to change that.”
“Ten years is a very, very long time,” says Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “Many things have changed, whether it’s the display technology, the custom silicon, et cetera.” Eventually, he told me, the confluence of chips, display tech, and software architecture “met our bar.” “I like my engineers to be gated by physics, not imagination or timelines,” he says.
Joswiak, who holds Schiller’s old title of SVP of worldwide marketing, concedes that touch was overdue, at least for users with sophisticated needs. Its pro customers—engineers, scientists, software developers, and media creators—were impatient with Apple for its failure to let them interact directly with the screen. “Most pros own an iPad, and almost every pro owns an iPhone,” Joswiak says. “So this is something that they’re natural with. There’s a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch.”
Between the lines, Srouji and Joswiak seem to consider their competitors’ touchscreen implementations shabby and lazy. The Apple ethos, as every one of its executives will happily explain to anyone who asks, is an expectation of quality that’s sky-high. “If you’re working on something easy, you’re wasting your time,” says Srouji, who has been at Apple since 2008 and has pretty much driven its innovation by spearheading the company’s charge to custom-build silicon.