My pal and former editorial overlord Federico Viticci was in Los Angeles for Apple’s “Pro and tell” event at which the new MacBook Pro was unveiled. While there, he wrote a piece for MacStories about how this touch-equipped laptop is “a Mac for the iPad generation” and shared key details about the machine, including those pertaining to accessibility.
“What Apple announced today with the new MacBook Pro with touch and OLED feels like an obvious product designed for a generation of users that grew up with iPads and are now ready to graduate to a Mac for more intensive workflows,” Viticci said on Wednesday. “It also seems designed for people like me, who have gotten so familiar with the hybrid interactions of a modular iPad Pro and have found the Mac’s strict trackpad-only affair to be too limiting. Since I started using my MacBook Pro more earlier this year because of coding agents and AI apps, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve instinctively reached out to touch the screen, only to remember that, unlike with an iPad Pro, I can’t.”
As to accessibility, he notes there’s an option under Accessibility to disable the touch element altogether, as well as a setting to enable Display Zoom, which Viticci reported will “let you pinch to zoom into any part of the macOS UI to make it larger and easier to read.” Although the touchscreen is rightly getting the lion’s share of attention, it’s certainly plausible for someone, like me for instance, with low vision to be attracted to the new MacBook Pro primarily for its OLED display. Especially since touch, for all the work Apple did to implement it, is meant as a secondary input method if you want it, the OLED display arguably has more punch in terms of everyday impact depending on your needs and tolerances. As I wrote yesterday, the brightness and pixel-level control OLED brings to the table means better contrast than ever, even from that of my beloved Pro Display XDR. That could net someone with low vision real productivity gains—even if it’s merely working in Markdown writing news stories like I do. In a similar vein, I’m also curious to know what affordances Apple has provided users who may want to touch the screen but are physically incapable of doing so.
See also: Viticci’s post on X regarding the aforementioned accessibility features.
