A few changes in macOS Golden Gate 27 hint towards Apple introducing a Mac with a touchscreen quite soon. Apple added a bunch of developer tools that allow apps to differentiate touch input from mouse input. Liquid Glass elements also behave differently when you interact with them on a touchscreen — they bounce and glow more prominently, just like iOS.
Officially, these changes are for Sidecar, the feature that lets you use an iPad as a touchscreen Mac display. But Apple’s own documentation also states that these new features are “not just for the Sidecar display.”
What else could that be…? Maybe the touchscreen MacBook that’s rumored to launch later this year.
Clues that a touchscreen Mac is coming soon in macOS Golden Gate
Any time a radical new hardware product is on the horizon, there are often hints to its development that you can find in beta software. For an iPhone or Mac to work well with third-party apps out of the box, Apple may strongly encourage to adopt a new feature in advance, without admitting what the real purpose is.
The upcoming touchscreen MacBook is no exception. Multitouch screens behave very differently to mice, and even trackpads — you directly manipulate the content on screen. Here are the clues developers have found in the first beta of macOS Golden Gate.
Mac apps have much better support for multitouch displays
Photo: Mart Production/Pexels
After Monday’s keynote, Apple published a technote that outlines expansive new APIs for touch input in macOS 27. It introduces a set of tools, called gesture recognizers, that allow apps to respond to taps separately from mouse clicks.
The technote explains precisely how your app should map touches to clicks:
- Tapping the screen is equivalent to clicking a mouse.
- Touching and dragging the screen should work just like scrolling on a trackpad.
- Tapping and holding on the screen should work like holding down a right-click to bring up a context menu.
- Pinching with two fingers should zoom in and out, just like a trackpad.
There are also new APIs that let the app detect whether the display supports multitouch. While Apple says this API tells you “when a touch-capable Sidecar display is connected,” it also says the API is “not just for the Sidecar display.”
In other words, these APIs are for all touchscreens, not just for Sidecar, despite the technote ostensibly focusing on Sidecar.
The technote goes on to introduce updated APIs for touch-based scrolling, text gestures and dragging.
Liquid Glass buttons are much more animated
Another clue is visible to anyone using macOS Golden Gate. The Liquid Glass toolbars and buttons are no longer static, like in macOS Tahoe and previous versions. When you use Sidecar, Liquid Glass controls stretch, animate and glow — just like on iOS.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has pointed out how the Podcasts toolbar flashes bright white when you tap on it.
Buttons in the Calculator app stretch when you tap and drag them around. This effect is there when you drag it with a mouse, too, albeit much more subtly.
Segmented controls — like the Day/Week/Month/Year picker in the Calendar app — are also much more animated, like they are on iOS. In macOS Tahoe, they barely animated at all. Now in macOS Golden Gate, you see the same Liquid Glass bubble effect when you click on a new tab, but especially when you click and drag the selection left and right.
A folding iPhone is on the way, too
The OS 27 updates also strongly indicate that a folding iPhone is on the way … not that we were especially short on evidence.
The folding iPhone, rumored to be called “iPhone Ultra,” would be the first iPhone to support changing screen sizes. It’ll have a short front display that unfolds into a screen that’s twice as wide, roughly the size of an iPad mini.
Coincidentally, Apple has introduced a bunch of tools that let developers test how their iPhone apps work in different screen sizes and aspect ratios. The iPhone simulator on the Mac can be freely resized, as can the iPhone Mirroring app for end users.
Designer Sam Henri Gold found an iOS 27 framework that “references ‘foldState’ and ‘angleDegrees,’” in addition to “the total count of built-in displays.” Apple does not currently have any iOS devices that fold or include more than one display.
This is a second case of future hardware being hinted at through beta software … in the same release cycle.
D. Griffin Jones is a writer, podcaster and video producer for Cult of Mac. Griffin has been a passionate computer enthusiast since 2002, when he got his first PC — but since getting a Mac in 2008, he hasn’t turned back. His skills in graphic and web design, along with video and podcast editing, are self-taught over 20+ years. Griffin has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and has written several (unpublished) apps for Mac and iOS. His collection of old computers is made up of 40+ desktops, laptops, PDAs and devices, dating back to the early ’80s. He brings all of these creative and technical skills, along with a deep knowledge of Apple history, into his work for Cult of Mac.
