Apple is expected to unveil its first touchscreen MacBooks on Wednesday, abandoning a long-held aversion to the technology as it caps a burst of product launches ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.
Apple is holding an event in Los Angeles after launching a folding iPhone, Duo, at its 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 current CEO, John 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,” said Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
“Some things are purely inevitable.”
A key question for Apple is how customers will respond. The company has seen an uptick in Mac sales, but much of that growth has been among technology enthusiasts and businesses buying the machines to handle AI tasks on-device.
While Apple this week announced an upgraded base model of its MacBook Pro with a new M6 chip, Bloomberg News has reported that it plans to ship touchscreen models with its existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that already come in MacBook Pro models, meaning the new machines would not gain a significant performance boost over existing ones.
“The only thing people want is more memory and better processors for local models!” prominent tech commentator Jason Calacanis, the host of the All-In Podcast, wrote on X.