Dear Mac fans: Welcome to our glorious touchscreen future

Apple’s first MacBook with a touchscreen goes on sale today, so I just wanted to take a moment to welcome Mac fans to the party that is tapping and swiping on your screen. Those of us on Linux and Windows have been doing it for ages, so we know all too well the agony and the ecstasy of banging our ungainly mitts against the display to make it do something.

We also know where to get the best screen cleaners for cheap. Personally I like to use just a bit of distilled water and a microfiber cloth, but everyone’s got their own way of doing things.

I was thinking about that while listening to this week’s episode of The Full Nerd. which features the usual cast of characters discussing the touchscreen MacBook’s debut and what it means for the PC space. I hope you’ll agree with my feeling that it’s unequivocally a good thing, and I wish Apple had gotten to this point sooner—if only so that the software was more touch-friendly and the hardware was available on a wider variety of Macs.

Because that’s got to be where this is headed, right? There’s no way Apple is going to keep touchscreens exclusive to the new MacBook Pros (which start at nearly $3,000 a pop) unless the technology proves as unpopular as the Touch Bar, and I don’t think that’s possible.

No, I expect Apple will take some time to work out how to make a touchscreen work well at a cheaper price and smaller size, then roll out touchscreen Airs within a few years.

By then I hope the developers behind macOS and its most popular apps have had some time to fine-tune their software for touch, because I remember all too well the suffering we endured moving through the gradual evolution of touch interfaces from Windows 8 to 11. It’s easy enough to tap the Start button nowadays, but when I think back on the spew of Metro tiles that was the Windows 8 Start menu I have to hold back a shudder.

Even if it does take Apple an age to democratize the touchscreen Mac, I’m happy MacBook Pro owners can finally experience the joy of giving their hands from the touchpad or mouse when they’re feeling cramped. It’s all well and good to learn all the fancy multi-touch gestures, but honestly the thing I enjoy most about a touchscreen laptop is the freedom to uncoil my claws from the keyboard and stretch them out to tap the screen whenever they need a break.

Sure you look a little silly doing it and sure, your screen might wobble or get a bit smudged. But these are small problems, easily solved, so if you aren’t buying or using touchscreen laptops out of some Jobs-esque concern about developing “gorilla arms” I hope I can convince you to change your tune. Touchscreens went from an oddity to a luxury for me after I was diagnosed with RSI, and I know some of my colleagues have similar feelings because it comes up…

…in this week’s episode of The Full Nerd

This week your regular Full Nerd cohosts Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee were joined by PCWorld’s Michael Crider to chat about everything from touchscreens on Macs to the bone-headed remarks of Sam Altman, as well as the dismal news that the price of a new Raspberry Pi 5 is now pushing $400.

Later in the show they turned to taking questions from the chat and the Discord about everything from public Discord servers becoming searchable to what the next Xbox console will look like—and whether Xbox will sell another console at all. Tune in for all the tea!

Nerd news of the week

I wish I had better news to share with you this week, but everywhere I look AI hype continues to drive incredibly frustrating shortages of all sorts of PC components even as it helps AMD and Nvidia earn more from data centers than ever before.

• Windows is no longer the center of the PC universe: The Steam Deck, a $599 MacBook Neo, and Nvidia’s RTX Spark all point the same way: Windows no longer sets the PC agenda. Brad breaks it all down!
• AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history: AMD is expecting to beat Intel for the first time in history when it reports its revenues for Q4, which were driven almost entirely by its data center business—the company’s gaming business revenue is actually down year-over-year.
• Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops make no sense — until they do: We’ve tested Nvidia’s wild new chips for AI, gaming, and everyday work. Here’s where RTX Spark kicks ass—and where it doesn’t.
• RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB of VRAM shows real performance gains: This could be promising if you’re comfortable modding GPUs, as testing suggests an old RTX 2080 Ti gets a bit more capable if you double its onboard 11GB of VRAM by manually swapping out sticks on the card.
• I burned through 220,000 AI tokens just because I could: The real promise of local AI isn’t saving money. It’s making ridiculous amounts of experimentation cheap enough to stop asking “Should I?” and start asking “Why not?” I hadn’t really appreciated this until I began testing an RTX Spark laptop.
• TeamGroup CEO reckons supply-demand memory equilibrium may not happen until late 2028: Here’s your dose of memory crisis realness for the week, as the CEO of memory maker TeamGroup is saying he doesn’t expect RAM pricing to drop until 2028 at the earliest.
• Nvidia store quietly pulls the RTX 5080 following RTX 5090 removal: First the RTX 5090 and now the RTX 5080 have been removed from Nvidia’s online storefront, suggesting GPU demand isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. If you had your eyes on an RTX 5080 or 5070 Ti, seems like you might want to buy sooner rather than later!

That’s it for your first Full Nerd newsletter of November! I’ll catch up with you again this time next week, but in the meantime be sure to bookmark PCWorld and keep an eye on the YouTube channel for our latest videos from the PCWorld team. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Simply sign up on our website!

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.