Apple VP Reveals Design Decisions for 2016 MacBook Pro, the Company’s Bestselling Notebook in History

Apple’s Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller has revealed the reason behind a few key decisions on the MacBook Pro. In a recent interview with The Independent, Schiller said that one of Apple’s primary designers, Jony Ive, had rejected moving Mac computers to touchscreen “many years ago.”

“If you made the Mac a touchscreen, you’d have to figure out how to make it a good experience with your finger on a touchscreen,” Schiller told The Independent. “Trust me, we’ve looked at that — it’s a bad experience. It’s not as good or as intuitive as with a mouse and trackback.”

It seems like the Mac’s user experience, which has always been reliant on “indirect manipulation and cursors and menus,” is here to stay — at least for the time being. It’s certainly one thing that sets Apple apart from the leagues of computer manufacturers that have started incorporating touchscreens into their flagship devices.

Schiller also pointed out that the SD card slot was taken off of the 2016 MacBook Pro lineup for a couple of reasons. One of them seems to be Apple’s focus streamlining — Schiller said that an SD card sticking out of a slot is “cumbersome.” He added that many cameras already support wireless photo and video transfer, and that there are plenty of third-party card readers on the market if users were dead set on using one. But that certainly doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t taking some flack for the decision.

But while the SD card slot might be gone, the 3.5mm headphone jack isn’t — something that Cupertino recently nixed from its newest flagship smartphone. Why does the 2016 MacBook Pro still have it? Schiller said it’s because many professional MacBook users — many of whom are DJs, musicians and sound engineers — rely on the 3.5mm jack for their audio gear. So the decision to leave it on the new MacBook Pro lineup seems purely pragmatic.

When asked about the new MacBook Pro’s critics, Schiller said that he hopes they’ll get the chance to try the new device for themselves. He backed up his claims that the MacBook Pro is a natural evolution of the series with the fact that Apple has had more orders for the new computer than any previous notebook.