A touchscreen laptop shouldn’t be a big deal – we’ve had them for years. But Apple took a hardline stance against them. In addition to Tim Cook’s infamous 2012 quote equating it with the kitchen appliance mixer, Steve Jobs emphatically dismissed touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, saying, “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
The closest Apple came was the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, from 2016 to 2023, but that horizontal landing strip for your fingers on the keyboard deck represented mostly untapped potential. It sacrificed physical function keys (and for a time, the escape key) in favor of a non-deterministic user interface. A touch screen on a laptop is an established idea that we already know can be useful for taking direct actions on elements around the screen, either with an occasional touch and movement or through prolonged use of the stylus.
So how exactly is Apple going to do it? How will the company that puts the word “magic” in some of its product names bring magic to a touchscreen MacBook?
To start, rumors indicate that this touch MacBook Pro will have a new OLED screen. That sounds great, because OLEDs are amazing for deep blacks and vivid color contrasts, although they’re likely to make them even more expensive. They are rumored to use the current M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and come in 14- and 16-inch sizes like their contemporaries. In our current RAMgeddon world, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro currently starts at $2,499. Now add a more expensive OLED touch panel. Wow.
It is also speculated that the display will have a Dynamic Island cutout for the webcam instead of a notch. While I don’t love the notch, I’m firmly in the “It’s okay, you stop noticing it when you wear it for a while” camp. Dynamic Island should be a small aesthetic improvement, and if it works like it does on the iPhones, then it could also offer some touch multitasking with timers and information-containing music apps.
The touchscreen MacBook is also rumored to have a thinner and lighter chassis design. MacBook Pros became thicker and heavier with the M1 Pro/M1 Max generation after years of chasing thinness; That search brought us worse thermal temperatures and the dreaded butterfly keyboards. Frankly, this rumor makes me very nervous, because I don’t want a MacBook Pro that once again risks compromising performance due to its thinness. Not now nor ever again. Can Apple make its high-end MacBooks thinner again without compromising raw performance, battery life, or quality of life?
And what will the touch screen configuration of the new MacBook be like? How will you interact with it? Will it remain a conventional clamshell design or will Apple give its hinge additional flexibility to allow for new ways to use it through touch? I recently wrote about how fun I find 2-in-1 convertible laptops like Lenovo’s Yoga line, which has a hinge that folds completely and includes a chassis-mountable stylus. It would be great to see Apple show something boldly exciting that “pros and counts,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first touchscreen MacBook keeps things safe with a standard cover.
Whether foldable or convertible, will this MacBook work with an Apple Pencil or will it be touch-only? I hope Apple Pencil support is included, along with magnetic charging like on iPads, since it seems like a no-brainer for designers to use a precision tool for drawing on a touch-enabled Mac. But even if it works with an Apple Pencil, it will still be a Mac through and through, not an iPad. Apple is expected to introduce a revised Golden Gate macOS 27 with touch improvements just for this new MacBook, while maintaining a full desktop operating system. Since this MacBook is unlikely to replace the current models in Apple’s lineup (MacBook Pros with Pro and Max-level chips were updated earlier this year), it’s likely a branch of macOS.
MacBook Pros have focused primarily on chip upgrades and modest feature upgrades since the M1 Pro and M1 Max generations revitalized the lineup in 2021. An OLED touchscreen model represents a major shakeup, and like the iPhone Duo, there’s room for clutter or strange new quirks due to Apple’s design decisions. Tomorrow we will learn what Apple considers to be the “correct” way for a touch screen to work on a Waterproof.
