Not a separate touch panel, not a cut-down imitation, but a full screen you can press with your finger. For a company that once swore a laptop is not for poking at the display, this is a historic step. Of course, the story has a price — and it will become clear when someone is the first to catch the laptop on the corner of a table.
Because the screen is no longer just glass. The OLED matrix and the digitizer, that is the layer responsible for touch, are assembled into a single unit. Like in an iPhone: smash the display and the touch stops responding, even if the pixel itself survived. With an ordinary MacBook it used to happen that the glass cracked but the image and trackpad still worked, so you just sat and worked. Now the construction is different. A knock to the corner can turn into a band of dead pixels and, along with it, a dead touch zone.
What this means in money terms is an obvious question. Sales of the new model have only just started, and the first owners are already googling: how much does a screen replacement for a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen cost, and is it scary to ride the metro with it without a case. The worries are understandable: a single unit is almost always more expensive than a separate part. Plus parts are scarce at the start of sales, which rarely makes prices nicer.
Still, it is not all gloomy. The touchscreen gives what MacBook owners lacked, to the envy of Windows users: flipping through documents with a finger, zooming a picture like on a tablet, drawing notes between tasks. If the laptop has become your main machine, it is genuinely convenient. It is just that now it is handled a little more carefully than the previous generation. A plastic bumper on the backpack, a soft compartment, not tossing it on the bed with the charger sticking out — that is the whole science.
And if you are unlucky and it cracks, then it needs diagnosing straight away, even when the image is alive. The thin digitizer layer dies more quietly than is obvious to the eye: first a corner stops responding, then a strip under the keyboard. Catching it in time is cheaper to repair.
In short, money decides. The new MacBook Pro with a touchscreen is a surprisingly lively thing. But once broken it is no longer "slightly broken", it is "landed on the unit". Ride carefully — and let luck go to those who are careful.