Apple CEO John Ternus unveiled the company’s first touchscreen MacBooks this week, abandoning a long-held aversion to the technology as it caps a burst of product launches ahead of the Christmas shopping season.
On stage at an Apple event in Los Angeles, Mr Ternus showed a MacBook Pro model with an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, playing up the display’s contrast, sharpness and brightness in front of an audience of content creators and creative professionals.
He also said the company would return to a glowing logo on the back of the laptops.
“Look, we love the Mac, and it’s the reason why so many of us found our way to Apple in the first place. And the Mac has never been better, and it’s never been stronger,” Mr Ternus said on Wednesday.
The event is part of a media blitz filled with new product launches since Mr Ternus – a longtime Apple hardware executive – took over as CEO at the start of last month.
He launched a folding iPhone, Duo, at Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters in September and a smart home hub in New York earlier this month. While those products will test new markets for Apple, the Los Angeles event could rekindle an old question: should Apple put the touchscreens that it made mainstream in iPhones and iPads in its oldest product line?
Apple executives long resisted the idea, with Steve Jobs saying in 2010 that touchscreens on laptops were “ergonomically terrible” and then-CEO Tim Cook saying in 2012 that such devices would be as pleasing to users as converging a toaster and a refrigerator. Before becoming Apple’s CEO, Mr Ternus argued that Apple already made a touchscreen computer with its iPad lineup.
But touchscreens have been widely available for more than a decade on Windows devices, and with the iPhone nearing its two-decade anniversary, a new generation of buyers expects screens to respond to touch.
“I believe they were always wrong on pushing back on touch, and this is the long arm of reality setting in,” Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said. “Some things are purely inevitable.”
The new MacBook Pro with the touchscreen starts at $US2899 for the 14-inch model with the M5 Pro chip, while the highest-end configuration starts at $US4799 for the 16-inch model with the more powerful M5 Max chip. The new 16-inch model is 0.7 pounds lighter than the older, non-touchscreen model.
Apple said on Wednesday the new MacBook Pro is available for pre-order starting Wednesday and would go on sale on November 6, 2026. More details are available here
Stephen Nellis, Reuters
