A laptop with a touchscreen should be no big deal — we’ve had them for ages. But Apple took a hardline stance against them. In addition to Tim Cook’s infamous 2012 quote equating it to combining kitchen appliances, Steve Jobs emphatically dismissed touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible” back in 2010, saying, “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
The closest Apple got was the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, from 2016 to 2023, but that horizontal landing strip for your fingers on the keyboard deck mostly amounted to unrealized potential. It sacrificed physical function keys (and for a while, the escape key) in favor of a non-deterministic UI. A touchscreen on a laptop is an established idea we already know can be useful for taking direct action on things around your screen — whether with an occasional tap and flick or through prolonged stylus use.
So how is Apple going to do it exactly? How will the company that puts the word “magic” in some of its product names bring the magic to a touchscreen MacBook?
For starters, rumors indicate this touch-enabled MacBook Pro will have a new OLED display. That sounds great, because OLEDs are awesome for deep blacks and vivid color contrast, though it’s likely to make them even more expensive. They’re 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 RAMageddon world, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro currently starts at $2,499. Now add a pricier OLED touch panel to it. Woof.
The screen is also speculated to 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 fine — you stop noticing it when you use it for a while” camp. The Dynamic Island should be a small aesthetic improvement, and if it operates as it does on iPhones, then it could also offer some touch-based multitasking with timers and music apps tucking info into it.
The touchscreen MacBook is also rumored to have a thinner and lighter chassis design. The MacBook Pros got thicker and heavier with the M1 Pro / M1 Max generation after years of chasing thinness — that pursuit brought us worse thermals and the dreaded butterfly keyboards. Frankly, this rumor makes me the most nervous, because I don’t want a MacBook Pro that once again risks performance compromises for the sake of thinness. Not now, not ever again. Can Apple make its high-end MacBooks thinner again without compromising raw performance, battery, or quality of life?
And what will the new MacBook’s touchscreen setup be like? How will you interact with it? Will it remain a conventional clamshell design, or will Apple give its hinge any added flexibility to allow new ways to use it via 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 all the way around and includes a stylus for mounting to the chassis. It’d be great to see Apple showcase something boldly exciting as it “pros and tells,” but I won’t be surprised if the first touchscreen MacBook keeps things safe with a standard clamshell.
Whether it’s a clamshell or a 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-friendly Mac. But even if it works with an Apple Pencil, this will still be a Mac through and through — not an iPad. Apple is expected to introduce a revised macOS 27 Golden Gate with touch-friendly enhancements just for this new MacBook, while keeping it a full-blown desktop OS. Since this MacBook is unlikely to replace current models in Apple’s lineup (the MacBook Pros with Pro and Max-level chips were just updated earlier this year), this is likely to be an offshoot of macOS.
MacBook Pros have mostly been about chip bumps and modest feature improvements since the M1 Pro and M1 Max generation revitalized the line in 2021. An OLED touchscreen model represents a major shakeup, and like the iPhone Duo there’s room for messiness or weird new quirks due to Apple design decisions. We’ll learn tomorrow what Apple deems is the “right” way for a touchscreen to work on a Mac.