For 16 years,

had an answer ready whenever someone asked about a touchscreen Mac, and the answer was always some version of no.

Steve Jobs gave it first, with the most theatre. Tim Cook gave it with kitchen appliances, and Phil Schiller with user studies. In 2021, Apple's then hardware engineering chief, John Ternus, told The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern that the Mac was built around the keyboard and trackpad, adding: "We haven't really felt a reason to change that."

Apple has now found one.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is a mouthful even by Apple's standards, so I'll call it the touchscreen MacBook Pro from here on. It is the first Mac that responds to a finger on its screen, and also the first MacBook with an OLED panel, which, as Apple tells it, is the very reason touch could happen at all.

When Wired asked Ternus, now nearly two months into the CEO job, whether Apple was about to break its oldest Mac taboo, he kept it brief: "Who knew?" On X, he was a little less brief, writing that Apple was "glowing with excitement" over the new MacBook Pro and that "you've gotta touch it to believe it." With the glowing Apple logo back on the lid, the pun was almost certainly intended.

That is quite a turn for someone who, five years ago, couldn't see a reason to change the Mac at all, and Apple can expect some ribbing for it.

The reversal is also typical of how the company works. Apple's "never" has usually carried an unwritten condition, roughly "until we can do it in a way we like," and no product has taken longer to get past it than the touchscreen Mac.

Apple kept saying no, and nobody else quite proved it wrong

Jobs set the tone in October 2010, barely ten months after he had introduced the iPad. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical, he argued on stage. Reaching up to a laptop screen made for a nice demo, but Apple's own testing showed fatigue set in quickly, and after long enough, "your arm wants to fall off." Touch belonged on horizontal surfaces, which is why MacBooks got big glass trackpads instead.

Cook made a similar case two years later. Asked on a 2012 earnings call whether tablets and laptops would eventually merge, he likened the idea to combining "a toaster and a refrigerator," suggesting the result would please nobody. Microsoft released its first Surface tablets that same year, alongside a version of Windows rebuilt around touch.

Then came Schiller. In 2015, Apple's marketing chief laid out a broader theory of the product line to journalist Steven Levy: every Apple device is essentially a computer behind a sheet of glass, and each gets the interface that suits how it is used. Reaching over a fixed keyboard to poke a screen was uncomfortable, he argued, and macOS was built for the precision of a pointer, with tiny buttons and dense menus that fingers would fumble.

A year later, Apple did put touch on the MacBook Pro, just not on the display. The Touch Bar sat above the keyboard, and Schiller said the company had tested touchscreen Macs internally and come away convinced its instincts were right. The Touch Bar itself didn't last. Physical function keys returned in 2021, and the strip was gone from the lineup by 2023.

Stern, for her part, kept asking. When she put the question to software chief Craig Federighi at the Journal's Tech Live event in October 2022, he replied "Who's to say?" and the panel broke into laughter. By June 2025, Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak were meeting it with laughter alone. Going back through her archive on X this week, Stern noted that Apple's replies had slowly drifted from a flat "nope" to evasive laughter.

In hindsight, that was about as close to a yes as Apple ever gets.

Elsewhere, in the Windows world, touchscreen laptops became routine long ago. Machines with screens you can tap, and often fold back into a tablet, have sat on store shelves for well over a decade without ever being short of buyers. A generation raised on phones and tablets expects every screen to respond to touch, and plenty of laptops happily oblige.

Selling them, though, isn't the same as settling the argument, and Microsoft's own history shows it. Windows 8 rebuilt the PC around touch, and the backlash was strong enough that the Start button came back within a year. Windows 10 restored the familiar desktop, Windows 11 quietly dropped the dedicated tablet mode, and the company that bet hardest on touchscreen laptops has spent the decade since easing touch into the background. Part of the reason is that the trade-offs never went away. A touchscreen still tends to mean a glossier panel, more weight and shorter battery life, and with most apps never rethought for fingers, people were rarely given a good reason to reach for the screen.

Apple, meanwhile, was edging closer from the other side. The iPad picked up trackpad support in 2020 and a far more Mac-like iPadOS last year, complete with resizable windows and a menu bar. The Mac, in turn, had been running iPhone and iPad apps since its move to Apple silicon, apps built for fingers that never felt quite right under a cursor.

By January 2023, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman was reporting that Apple had a touchscreen MacBook Pro in the works, originally pencilled in for 2025. That date slipped, and for good reason. Apple had clearly decided a touchscreen Mac was coming; what it hadn't worked out yet was how to add one without giving anything up.

Touch could only come if it cost the Mac nothing

Ternus's explanation for the timing is the most revealing part of this story. Apple, he told Wired, needed to reach a point where adding touch didn't make the MacBook Pro worse in any way: not heavier, not thicker. Anything earlier would have meant a compromise on the company's most expensive laptop.

The OLED panel is what made the maths work. The touch sensor is built directly into the display rather than laid on top as a separate layer, so it adds neither bulk nor noticeable lag, and because OLED needs no backlight, the lid slims down too. The 16-inch model now weighs about 1.8kg, roughly 300 grams less than before, while the 14-inch drops to around 1.36kg. Both are marginally thinner, and slimmer borders stretch the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches.

Apple calls it the best laptop display in the world, and the numbers support the claim. The tandem OLED panel stacks two light-emitting layers to hit 2,000 nits in both HDR and everyday SDR use, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a refresh rate that moves between 10Hz and 120Hz, and colour that spans both P3 and Adobe RGB.

For photographers, and I count myself among them, that last detail will matter more than any tap or swipe.

The smaller decisions tell you how seriously Apple took the ergonomics argument it once made against itself. The hinge has been redesigned to keep the display steady under a finger, though early demo footage still shows a slight bounce on a firm tap. The cooling system now pushes warm air away from the panel so it doesn't feel hot to the touch. Even the webcam has been considered, with stabilisation that smooths the video feed when you tap the screen mid-call.

Software is where Schiller's old objections have been dealt with most directly. macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn't throw out the desktop the way Windows 8 did with its tiles. The menu bar and windows look as they always have, but in the demos Wired saw, menu items and the little traffic-light buttons grew as a finger reached them, so a tap lands where it should. Looking back, the rounder buttons and roomier menu bar that came with Liquid Glass were clearly groundwork.

Apps that haven't been updated still respond, because macOS simply translates a tap into a click, and the Dynamic Island crosses over from the iPhone as the new home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. Apple's own apps go further, with a multi-touch keyboard in Logic Pro and pinch-to-zoom on a cut in Final Cut Pro, while apps from Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve to Blender and Microsoft Office are lining up support.

Apple's footnote is less eager. Those apps arrive later this year, and as with the iPhone Duo, where many apps are still being updated for the folding screen, it may be a while before touch feels at home across the Mac.

Jobs would still mind the tired arms, and Apple knows it

The pricing makes the intended audience clear. The 14-inch model with M5 Pro starts at Rs 3,49,900 in India and the 16-inch at Rs 4,09,900, while the M5 Max versions begin at Rs 5,49,900 and Rs 5,89,900. In the US, the two start at $2,899 and $3,399, and a fully specced 16-inch model climbs all the way to $14,549.

Joswiak's case, as he put it to Wired, is that Apple's professional users already own an iPad and an iPhone, and that a younger generation of creators simply expects a screen to respond to touch. The MacBook Air and iMac don't get it, and Ternus, predictably, wouldn't say whether they ever will. Apple has made a neat case for what touch can do for colourists, musicians and developers, but the harder sell will come if it ever reaches the MacBook Air, where Apple will face the same question Windows laptops never quite answered for everyday buyers: why anyone needs to reach for the screen at all.

Nobody is being pushed into it, either. The regular 14-inch MacBook Pro, refreshed only a day earlier with Apple's newer M6 chip, stays on the shelves without a touchscreen. That leaves buyers with a slightly odd choice: the touchscreen model gets the better display, while the one without it gets the newer processor.

Which brings us to Jobs.

It's easy to picture him furious, and plenty of longtime Apple fans will insist this would never have happened on his watch. I'm not so sure.

Jobs said a lot of things on stage that Apple later quietly undid. He maintained the company had no interest in making a phone, right up until the iPhone. He waved off video on the iPod until the hardware could handle it. In 2007, he said that if you see a stylus, "they blew it," and Apple now sells a Pencil that works with the iPad and the new iPhone Duo. In almost every case, his no was aimed at the version of an idea that existed at the time.

The touchscreen laptop of 2010 fits that pattern. It was usually a touch layer added to an ordinary laptop screen, running software built for a mouse, and his complaint about holding an arm up to it was fair. Sixteen years on, nobody has offered a convincing answer to it, and Apple isn't trying to: the trackpad hasn't shrunk, and Ternus still describes the Mac as an indirect input device first. Touch here is for the moments when reaching out is quicker than steering a cursor, whether that's nudging a colour wheel, playing a chord, pinching into a photo or tapping a Live Activity.

So what would Jobs say? He would probably still tell you your arm will get tired, and he would be right. Then he would likely ask whether the screen underneath was the best Apple had ever made, whether touch had cost the machine a single gram or millimetre, and whether macOS still felt like macOS.

This MacBook Pro has an answer to each of those, and getting there took 16 years. For a company whose co-founder once called touchscreen laptops "ergonomically terrible," taking that long to say yes might be the most Jobs-like thing it has done in a while.

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