Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company ’s Plugged In .
Contrary to conventional wisdom , Steve Jobs didn’t reject the possibility of Apple adding touch input to Macs. I remember that only because he told me so himself, when I squeezed in the last question during a post-keynote Q&A at Apple’s headquarters on October 14, 2008.
As far as I know, there’s no video of our brief exchange. But here’s the account I wrote later that day , in which I report that Jobs said Apple had tested the concept. According to Engadget ’s liveblog , he added, “So far, it hasn’t made a lot of sense to us.” Implicitly, that left open the possibility that it could make sense someday.
Someday came this week. On Wednesday, Apple announced its first touchscreen Macs , 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with a PRO OLED XDR display. Starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch version—and configurable up to a $14,549 monster with a 16-inch screen, 128GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage—they are available for preorder now and go on sale November 6.
Their arrival marks the end of a lengthy era during which Apple executives regularly dismissed the idea of touchscreen Macs, even as it grew increasingly apparent that they were working on them. After years of speculation , we finally know how the company envisions touch changing the Mac experience. And the answer is: not all that much.
Along with introducing touch input, these are the first Macs with OLED screens. Apple’s press release dwells on that aspect and its advantages—2,000 nits of peak brightness, 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, superwide color gamut—before discussing, more briefly, their support for touch gestures. It emphasizes that “these new ways to interact with MacBook Pro work in tandem with the keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures pros know and love.”
Bottom line: The new MacBook Pros are MacBook Pros first and foremost, aimed at people who want the most technological sophistication available in a portable Mac. The touch input isn’t incidental, but it also isn’t the main point. As CEO John Ternus put it to Steven Levy of Wired : “Oh yeah, it has touch as well.”
Even as a complement to keyboard and trackpad input rather than a replacement for it, touch introduced an array of challenges Apple had to confront. For example, on-screen elements such as menus magnify when tapped for greater finger-friendliness. The company also strengthened the laptop’s hinge so jabbing at the display wouldn’t push it back, and added camera stabilization to reduce unsightly jiggling from touch interactions.
Finally, MacBooks with screens you can poke at [Photo: Apple]
Ultimately, though, Apple has chosen to usher the Mac into the touch age in the least disruptive, epoch-shifting way possible. For customers prepared to splurge for one of the company’s priciest portables, the feature is additive to the interface they already know. And for the rest of us, nothing’s changed.
This transition stands in contrast to the longer, twistier one that Windows PCs went through. PCs with touchscreens go back to at least 1983, when HP introduced a desktop one called the HP-150 . But they got their biggest boost in 2011, when Microsoft announced Windows 8 . At the time, Apple’s iPad was only a little over a year old, and it seemed possible that its influence might be as profound as that of the iPhone. Windows 8, which sported oversize buttons and other elements designed to facilitate touch input, was made to survive such a revolution.
Instead, it turned out that most Windows users weren’t clamoring for radical change. Microsoft was forced to roll back some of Windows 8’s new ideas to ensure PCs still worked well with a keyboard and mouse. Touchscreens did become a common feature. But the Apple product that profoundly influenced PC makers was the MacBook Air, which was sleek and stylish but most definitely a laptop, not an iPad wannabe.
Fifteen years later, there are Windows devices that couldn’t exist without touch, such as Microsoft’s own Surface Pros and Lenovo’s foldable Yogas . The PC ecosystem is better for that diversity. But they’re far outnumbered by laptops that are wholly conventional except that their displays support touch. And Windows PCs without touch input are still with us, too.
In other words, Apple’s measured approach to touch on the new MacBook Pros resembles the one most touch-equipped Windows PCs ultimately landed on. It’s just that Apple did less stumbling around in public to get here—with the notable exception of the ill-fated Touch Bar, the OLED strip that briefly replaced function keys on most MacBook Pros and didn’t seem to make anybody happy. (After being intrigued by it at first , I was relieved when I got a new MacBook that didn’t have one.)
In 2017, Apple tried placating touch fans with the Touch Bar OLED strip. It didn’t work. [Photo: Apple]
It’s also worth comparing the MacBook’s touch transition to another that went in the opposite direction. Back in 2020, Apple introduced the Magic Keyboard, an iPad keyboard case with a built-in trackpad. Using my iPad Pro in full laptop-replacement mode worked shockingly well from the start. Yet the iPad’s existing touch interface continued to be equally usable if you never put your tablet into a Magic Keyboard at all.
Personally, I regret some of the design changes Apple later introduced in iPadOS 26 and 27 to make iPads more Mac-like, and hope it rethinks them in future releases. Overall, though, the iPad’s evolution from touch-centric input to touch, keyboard, and trackpad sets a high bar for this kind of transformation.
Some people have long drooled over the prospect of the Mac and iPad merging into a single computing platform, which would require them to offer a consistent approach to juggling multiple forms of input. I hope they remain quite different, and don’t see any evidence in the new MacBook Pros that Apple wants to turn Macs into iPads.
Still, Apple being Apple, it isn’t talking about where it plans to go next—“You know I will never tell you anything about our future,” Ternus told Wired ’s Levy. Will all MacBook Pros get touchscreens? (Not immediately: The company also announced a new 14-inch non-touch Pro this week, and the existing 16-inch one remains available.) How about the MacBook Air and Neo? Will Apple bring touch input to the iMac, or does its oft-expressed objection to the ergonomics of lifting your arm to touch a screen still apply to larger desktop displays?
Apple may be waiting to see how Mac fans respond to the new MacBook Pros before coming up with answers to all these questions. Until we know more, it won’t be clear whether this week’s news was a big bang or a trial run. Either way, it’s progress. Even though it still feels weird knowing I’ll never again hear an Apple executive helpfully explain why touch makes no sense on a Mac.
Mac fans: Are these the touch-enabled MacBook Pros you’ve been waiting for? Drop me a line at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your take.
You’ve been reading Plugged In , Fast Company ’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I’m also on Bluesky , Mastodon , and Threads , and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard .
More top tech stories on Fast Company
Airbnb’s next big bet: 1 million free nights a year for people in crisis
CEO Brian Chesky explains why he’s committing $500 million over five years to dramatically expand its nonprofit’s housing efforts. Read More →
Our world runs on satellites. What happens when we can’t launch more?
‘This will undoubtedly change the nature of competition in the space sector.’ Read More →
Google’s AI Mode won’t say Biden won the 2020 election in the U.S. But in other countries, it’s a different story
The AI search tool readily acknowledges President Biden’s U.S. election victory when queried from abroad, even as it sidesteps the question for American users. Google says it’s working on a fix. Read More →
These people are cutting the clutter and redesigning their smart TVs with AI
People are growing weary of smart TV software that doesn’t serve them. Now they’re vibe coding their way out. Read More →
Why the government wants self-driving cars to glow cyan
Red means stop, green means go, turquoise means nobody’s driving. Read More →
Anthropic’s IPO is selling investors a story. The numbers tell another one
Retail investors are getting a chance to bet on AI companies. But behind the soaring revenue projections are massive infrastructure commitments and an uncertain path to profitability. Read More →
