The first touchscreen Mac ships with a way to ignore the touchscreen. A single setting in System Settings turns touch input off, and it applies to Sidecar, the feature that lets an iPad act as a second Mac display, as well as to the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR.
To use it, open the Apple menu, choose System Settings, select Accessibility, and click Touch under "Physical and Motor." Then toggle on Ignore Touch Gestures. Your Mac stops responding to touches, and an iPad used through Sidecar stops responding too. Flip the same switch back to restore touch.
Finer control sits elsewhere. Touch Display is its own item in the System Settings sidebar, not part of Accessibility. There, each gesture can be switched off individually, and Swipe between spaces, Mission Control, and App Exposé have pop-up menus for changing how the gesture is performed. The Accessibility Touch screen adds Touch Accommodations, which changes how the screen reads taps, swipes, and touch-and-hold, plus AssistiveTouch. A separate Zoom option covers zooming with the touch display or Sidecar.
The reversal is stark. In 2010, Steve Jobs argued that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical," pointing to arm fatigue. In 2021, John Ternus, then Apple's hardware engineering chief, said the Mac was made exclusively for indirect input and that Apple saw no compelling reason to change. One explanation offered is that people raised on phones and tablets now expect to touch their computers.
The settings layout suggests how Apple is hedging. A blanket off switch, per-gesture toggles, and gesture options that can be reconfigured read as touch added to the Mac, not a Mac rebuilt around it. Windows laptops have offered touchscreens for years, so the novelty here is Apple's about-face, not the hardware.
Developers have the clearest reason to leave touch on. Xcode's iOS Simulator responds to direct touch, so taps, swipes, and pinches can be tested on the screen instead of approximated with a trackpad and keyboard modifiers.