MKBHD tears into the touchscreen MacBook: "sloppy and messy"

Apple has just shown its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, and the most famous tech reviewer on the planet has already delivered his verdict. Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, got his hands on the new laptop and posted a first impressions video. His bottom line on touch: using it is "still kind of sloppy and messy."

His complaints are as old as touchscreen laptops themselves. "I never want fingerprints on my display. I never want the display wobbling around as I'm touching it. And I never want to hold my arm out and have my arm get tired," Brownlee says. Apple made the hinge a bit stiffer, but a firm tap near the top of the screen still makes the lid wobble. There is no Apple Pencil support either.

He doesn't trash the touch layer itself: it is responsive, handles pinch to zoom and multi finger gestures, and lets you fling windows to the side of the screen like on an iPad. Small macOS buttons get magnified when you poke them so they are easier to hit. But in Brownlee's words, Apple is adapting for your finger without actually solving anything. Most people, he thinks, will stick to the keyboard and trackpad, and the one real use he sees is iOS developers tapping a simulated iPhone right on the screen.

He opened the video with an old Apple quote calling vertical touch surfaces ergonomically terrible, the kind of thing where after a while your arm wants to fall off. "Sorry, I couldn't resist," he added.

What he does like is the new OLED panel and the weight. The 14 inch model dropped from about 3.5 to 3 pounds, and the 16 inch is nearly a pound lighter. "I'd upgrade for the weight savings before I would for the touchscreen," he says. The 14 inch starts at $2,899, a $400 premium over the regular MacBook Pro with the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. We covered the launch itself here.

The verdict: Apple spent years saying laptops don't need touch, then built one and immediately got hit with the exact complaints it used to wave away.