If the touchscreen MacBook is 100% happening, the question shifts from, “Will Apple finally release a MacBook with touch support?” to, “Do I want to buy a MacBook with touch support?” Thanks to an expanded touch feature in MacOS Golden Gate, the next version of Apple’s desktop software, you can begin to answer that question without waiting for a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen display to arrive.
Apple is sure to tweak future versions of MacOS to make it more touch-friendly, but if we get a touchscreen MacBook later this year or early next year, it will arrive with Golden Gate. And Golden Gate doesn’t look drastically different from MacOS Tahoe. It doesn’t introduce larger buttons or menus or contextual scaling that would make it easier to navigate the OS with your fingertip on a touchscreen.
How will touch work with Golden Gate? Will you tap, pinch and swipe on the touch display more than you will on the trusty touchpad? How different will next year’s version of MacOS look from this year’s after a touchscreen MacBook has been released? A touchscreen MacBook raises a lot of questions. And there are a couple of items in Golden Gate that can help us start to answer them.
Golden Gate: The bridge to a touchscreen Mac?
Golden Gate is more of an under-the-hood update to improve performance and stability than a design overhaul. It will include the revamped Siri AI that’s coming to iPhones this fall, but otherwise, it includes a number of smaller tweaks and additions.
One of those additions is a swipe-to-refresh gesture that gives Mac users the same ability to swipe down on an app to refresh its content as you get on an iPhone or iPad. This gesture seemingly has an eye toward touch support because it feels more natural performing that move with a finger on a screen than with a cursor and touchpad, but it doesn’t actually let you navigate MacOS via touch (yet). What does let you navigate it, however, are the expanded touch gestures Apple has added to Sidecar.
Apple introduced Sidecar in 2019 with MacOS Catalina.
Sidecar, which has been around for a while, lets you use an iPad as a second screen next to your Mac. Touch gestures were basically limited to two-finger scrolling and pinch-to-zoom on an iPad’s display. You could jab at the iPad’s display all you wanted, but Sidecar wouldn’t let you interact with MacOS elements via touch. You needed to use your Mac’s touchpad (or connected mouse) to control things on the iPad’s display just as you would on your MacBook’s display. That’s changing with Golden Gate.
According to Apple, Sidecar in Golden Gate, “offers more complete support for touch, including tapping on any control, scrolling with one finger, system gestures and Markup.” Sidecar in Golden Gate will also let you try out the new swipe-to-refresh gesture on an iPad’s touchscreen.
Now, you can understand how navigating a Mac’s menu bar and dock feels via touch. Or juggling dozens of tabs in Safari or Chrome, digging into System Settings, making edits in Photoshop or finding your way in Apple Maps by tapping on a Mac’s touchscreen.
Device compatibility
To try out Sidecar’s expanded touch functionality, you’ll need a compatible Mac running MacOS 27 and a compatible iPad running iPadOS 27. As in the past, your Mac and iPad will need to be signed into the same Apple ID, connected to the same Wi-Fi network, and have Bluetooth enabled. The two devices also need to be within 30 feet of one another.
For the intrepid unafraid of encountering bugs, diminished battery life and other strange behaviors, developer betas are available now for MacOS 27 and iPadOS 27. (I don’t recommend doing this on your main devices.) You could wait for the more stable public betas to hit in July or for Apple to release the final versions in September and still have plenty of time to experiment before we see a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen display, which isn’t expected until late this year or early next.
