Apple is next week preparing to launch a touchscreen MacBook Pro, if Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is correct. If true, it would be a strange and controversial decision – not least because Apple already has a device that fits that mould perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.
Apple has long denied any interest in adding touchscreens to its MacBook range. In fact, it’s been positively sniffy about the entire concept.
As far back as 2010, Steve Jobs was dismissing the idea of touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible,” claiming that “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
In 2012, Tim Cook also derided Microsoft’s touchscreen Surface laptops, arguing that you couldn’t “converge a toaster and a refrigerator.” And when Apple introduced the (since abandoned) Touch Bar on its MacBook Pro in 2016, then Apple design guru Jonny Ive said a touchscreen wasn’t “particularly useful.”
If Apple has decided to reverse more than a decade of top-level opposition to touchscreen laptops, it’s doing so at a strange time. Although macOS and iPadOS now share the same visual styling, macOS has grown less touch friendly in recent versions.
For example, macOS used to have an iPadOS-like feature called Launchpad, which presented all of the installed apps on a Mac as a grid of touch-friendly icons (as pictured above), very similar to the design of the iPad/iPhone home screen. Apple ditched Launchpad in the most recent macOS 26, replacing it with a much smaller and less finger-friendly Apps pop-up menu.
Little else about the current macOS is touch optimized. As Microsoft has discovered with successive versions of Windows, an interface that is predominantly designed for mouse/keyboard doesn’t translate well to fingers being dabbed on a screen. At best it’s clunky and imprecise, at worst unusable.
Nor do the vast majority of Mac apps lend themselves to touch operation. Yes, developers can make iPad apps available in the Mac App Store, but more than a decade of touch on Windows has shown that very few apps successfully straddle both mouse/keyboard and touch operation.
Touchscreen MacBook? Why Not Just Buy An iPad?
The bigger mystery is why Apple feels the need to deliver a touchscreen MacBook Pro when it already has one in all but name: the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.
The Magic Keyboard comes with a decent sized touchpad and a keyboard that is similar in size and quality to that of a MacBook Pro. Apple has also made efforts to make iPadOS more like macOS in recent versions, with the ability to open apps in resizeable windows introduced with iPadOS 26 last year.
The experience of iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is increasingly similar to that of a touchscreen MacBook Pro. Perhaps the biggest obstacle on the iPad is iPadOS’s appalling file system, which still makes it bafflingly difficult to move files from one app to another. Creating an iPadOS file system that was similar to that of macOS would be an awful lot better than trying to crowbar touchscreen controls into macOS itself.
Apple has spent years arguing that a touchscreen MacBook doesn’t make sense and it was right. It’s already so close to creating the perfect touchscreen laptop. Sadly, it looks like it’s backing the wrong horse.