Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter, writing about the new MacBook Pro and how Apple launched it:
Adding touch to that should have been treated as the biggest change to the Mac in more than half a decade. Instead, Apple presented it as more of a routine upgrade — rather than an opportunity to build something new. The updated models are significantly lighter and slightly thinner, with better heat management and a redesigned cooling system. Yet they look much like the tried-and-true 2021 versions and run the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips introduced this past spring.
Apple has finally made a touch-screen Mac but is offering few new reasons for customers to take advantage of the feature. As expected, the software implementation is largely about tapping, swiping, pinching, zooming and scrolling. The most interesting application I saw was using the touch display to test iPhone apps in development, which is hardly a mass-market selling point. In some cases, the touch controls are even too small to be easily tapped.
Rather than enabling a new paradigm, the addition instead serves several marketing and financial purposes: It closes a gap that Windows laptop makers have highlighted for years; accommodates consumers who grew up with iPhones and iPads and find it strange that a pricier Apple laptop won’t respond to touch; and gives the company another feature to market to prospective upgraders. The change also makes interactions across Apple’s products more consistent.
He goes on from there, but his overall point is that Apple didn’t push the MacBook Pro far enough when adding touch. That’s a point I disagree with; Apple’s way of treating touch as a nice addition atop an already-beloved machine was the right call.
The last time Apple totally reworked the MacBook Pro, it did not go well, and reworking macOS for touch would invite a lot of the issues Microsoft has had with Windows when trying the same thing. Stability is the name of the game with a product like this.