Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro laptop with a touchscreen at its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday.
Until now, Apple has long resisted the idea of a touchscreen laptop. On a 2012 earnings call, former CEO Tim Cook, responding to a question about why he doesn’t think the tablet and laptop will converge, said, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” In 2010, Steve Jobs called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible.” Apple tried replacing the function keys with the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros starting in 2016, but it went back to physical function keys with the 2021 MacBook Pro redesign and fully dropped the Touch Bar in 2023.