MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
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That means Apple will begin imposing all sorts of UI dreck on all of us, whether we want to use our screens as touch surfaces or not.
This is basically what happened with Microsoft - Windows Vista and 7 were installed in plenty of laptops with touchscreens, and customers would complain about not being able to maximize windows without closing them, not being able to open menus without touching toolbar buttons, etc.
Eventually Microsoft listened to them and we got Windows 8. Now this is the beginning of the same process for macOS.
Same goes for Linux. My CachyOS install on my Framework 13 Pro has a touch screen. There’s literally no downside for me having it. I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. But if I want to scroll a website or scrub a video the option is there.
We saw the same thing happen with mobile first on websites.
Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.
One of the most common actions among all computer users, zooming and centering a photo, is easier with a touch screen.
Even adding just that one thing is worth having a touch screen for.
Hey, guess what, working in the iOS simulator is now way easier because you can touch your apps that you're developing for iOS and iPadOS, isn't that kind of worth a lot?
Windows 8, which was tablet-oriented, was one of these skip generations of windows that nobody cares about in the end, and when the next comes everybody forgets. I never installed it anyway. I have not owned a touchscreen laptop myself since then, but from friends that have and I have used theirs, it is like OP described as a "harmless additional feature/why not", something that just makes certain interactions a bit faster.
But especially on an actual laptop, one that you cannot just separate the screen from the keyboard, stuff like "virtual keyboard" and "tablet mode" matter much less because it is not like you will take it and use it as a pure tablet anyway.
So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.
But even if I accept your premise, I’ll remind you that Windows 7 came out 19 years ago. I didn’t exactly own a 27” 4K monitor in 2009, and a 14” or 16” screen laptop in 2009 would not have been thin and light like it is today. 2009 was like “my bezels are over a half inch wide” era.
The OS is fully scalable as well. You can just make it smaller in a very granular way. Windows 7 wasn’t capable of that.
Would it change anyhthing? No. Because developers of the programs what are not part of Windows aren't keen on keeping "the same efficiency". Audacity 4, Thunderbird are good examples of a bad interface - and they did it disregarding the OS UI.
They are basically throwing away the existing UI asking with its decades of refinement in favor of something that looks like what you'd get if apple mail and outlook had a disfugured child.
This isn’t an unimplemented theory. You can head over to Best Buy right now and see what it’s like to use a touch screen laptop.
I feel like all this debate is taking place in an odd vacuum where a lot of us are talking about a bunch of potential problems with having a touch screen on a computer and all these problems are already resolved.
Maybe it’s similar to the whole iPhone duo thing where Apple users are just discovering all the caveats of a foldable phone, but we’ve already gone over all of it with competitors.
I rarely used tablet mode but genuinely miss having a touchscreen.
what i've learning developing and creating products over the years is that harmless features tend to be the ones that cause the most problems. for ex, now you have to add touchscreen code to the OS vs previously not having it at all. and this code or feature we will support for the rest of the lifetime of that product.
In the case of touch screens, it hasn't caused a lasting problem in Windows or Linux.
However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.
Aero -> Liquid Glass
Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications
Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS
Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades
Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro
I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.
1. Takes extra battery 2. I’m not touching my screen regardless. It gets dirty enough
My last three or four laptops, which never even booted Windows, have had disabled touchscreens
Apps in Windows and KDE don't really change their behavior just from having a touch screen.
I routinely forget that my Framework 13 Pro even has a touch screen.
Basically a product for the people currently carrying around a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro.
Just touch on a laptop screen makes no sense. I’ve never felt the need to do this.
I think touch screen Mac is mostly pointless though.
I liked the touch bar for some things, but I deeply hated it, add to this the butterfly keyboard, and you got yourself the perfect storm...
The top of the keyboard is literally the worst location I can think there to be a short, long touchscreen.
Maybe it's not a problem for people with tiny hands but I'm bordering on, "palm a basketball" size.
What I want is a do-not Touch-screen
Trackpad is enough, and closer to where I am already busy touching the keyboard
I like that they do this. If it doesn't catch on, they will change back, like with the touch bar.
ive never seen someone use a laptop touch screen effectively
just get an ipad
But for example, as iOS Developer, this is something I could use to test apps in different simulators.
So, it seems Apple is not promoting the touch screen as the main control, but just as something additional to the trackpad and keyboard. Like 'This will be useful in specific scenarios'.
The marketing material shows a person playing a virtual piano with their fingers..
But there is an intermediate point somewhere between “no touch” and “all touch” that I think could make sense for a modern laptop that is created for a generation of people who are brought up with iPhones and iPads. I can’t imagine this feature being useful for me, but I would appreciate the better OLED screen on my regular MacBook Pro. And a lighter machine to boot. And if I can turn off the touch features, then I’d be pretty happy with the hardware — if not the price.
With the difference that Apple has got a near monopoly on tablets.
I don't like touch screens, they are a counter-pattern for a laptop. Yet I don't mind people liking it and using it. But I am in fear that the UI will get impacted also for non-users.
The end result will be akin to taking keyboards away from Platinum league top tier Korean pro RTS players. 500+ operations per minute down to 10
That just hasn’t happened with Windows touch screens.
Yes, Microsoft did fuck around and find out with Windows 8, but by the time Windows 10 landed an entire decade ago, this whole issue has been completely settled. That’s right, your Windows/Linux user friends have been using touchscreens (or no touch screens) without issue for a decade. No UX sky has fallen in this regard.
There’s absolutely zero downside to having a touch screen on Windows and you also absolutely don’t need a touch screen to use it.
I’m using a touch screen on my Linux laptop right now and it’s great. I don’t have to use it. The screen being touch didn’t cost me extra money. It’s just there if I want it.
The Apple camp seems to believe that every technology included with a product must have some kind of intentional holistic value. Apple removed the USB-A port because USB-C is the future. Apple removed the escape key and the function keys because the Touch Bar would replace it.
But the truth of the matter is, sometimes the option to just include both isn’t some kind of magical barrier that Apple can’t do.
You go out and buy a ThinkPad X9 15p and it has 3x thunderbolt, HDMI, SD card, and USB-A. Why doesn’t a MacBook Pro include USB-A? Well, remember, USB-A is the past! It’s legacy!
But the thing about it being unnecessary doesn’t change the fact that it remains trivially expensive to include, and it comes in handy for a bunch of peripherals that aren’t even that old.
So, I think this is why everyone assumes that Apple is going to destroy the OS because of some new thing they add to the hardware. Because the Apple cult is all about the mythical finely crafted experience. If you don’t do things the Apple way you’re holding it wrong. but in Microsoft/Linux-land, they don’t really care. Linux is fully free, and Microsoft knows their demographic net is too wide and their marketshare is too high that they can’t dictate form factor, choice of peripherals, etc. Their whole philosophy is that Windows is suitable for anything and everything.
The Apple culture can’t contemplate a technology company just including an extra option for users with no specific intended use case. PC manufacturers include a touch screen because, screw it, it only costs a few cents extra and maybe someone might like it, software integration be damned/that’s not our problem.
Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.
This is even true with laptops since bezels have dramatically shrunk in size.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the Settings app being a downgrade from Control Panel and being too padded or whatnot, but let's not forget that the old Windows XP era Control Panel couldn't even be maximized. It was just one size no matter what.
We forget this because Windows 7 was ugly and Windows 10 and 11 are nicer looking and that feels like progress, somehow. But you don't get nearly the functional information density with Windows 11 that you did with 7.
The taskbar icons are the exact same size. The tray icons are the exact same size. I’m struggling to figure out what’s different.
I personally use KDE which you can fully customize in terms of sizing, it’s great on a touch screen.
Display scaling 75%: 9px font, 36px button
Where's the setting for 12px font, 24px button?
I still don’t really see the information density problem. You can fully customize the OS scaling way more than you ever could with older OS versions. Again, things like windows task bar icons and tray icons are the exact same size as Windows 7. Yeah they’re bigger than Windows 95 but I only had 800x600 to work with in those days.
No, we didn't. And yet we didn't have to scroll through a settings list with 10 elements.
And no, information density isn't "make everything smaller". It's "use space on screen efficiently".
For example, "modern" startup menu shows fewer items on an area 10x larger than the entire screen available to win95. And no amount of scaling can fix that. And this permeates the entire OS: https://www.buildwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/4-4.... vs https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HBTFbzlXwAA5OwD.jpg
Windows laptops never expected tough screen adoption to hit 90% and still touch degraded the experience.
The worry here is that with Apple's e2e design control over the Mac, that this pivot will mean our MacOS UX will be removed in lieu of a more iPad-like experience.
Just look at other developer-friendly features like unlocked bootloaders, background jobs, unsigned software that Apple has removed from their hardware .
So this is a big deal and significant. It's different than you running Linux on your Windows laptop because the touch experience there never had a chance to push out the traditional UX.
Windows laptops have been majority touch screen for a long time, so in theory this touch experience could have pushed out the traditional windows experience more. With the exception of the repressed memories of Windows 8, it just hasn’t happened. Despite most Windows laptops coming with touch screens, the interface is very much mouse and keyboard oriented.
But also, Apple still can’t make Mac mini or Mac Studio users use a touch screen.
In theory the iMac could gain a touch screen, the Studio Display could gain one, but I think that’s very fundamentally different ergonomic situation than a laptop.
When I’m at a desk like a coffee shop I can rest my arm on the table and scroll the browser with my thumb at the lowest part of the screen very easily on a laptop. A desktop computer screen is a lot different than that, usually sitting higher and further away, so I still think every desktop Apple sells will stick with non-touch for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps the strongest indicator is just that Apple has Microsoft as a case study. Everyone saw what happened with Windows 8 and knows not to repeat that sort of debacle.
Finally, I have to imagine that software development tools are much better now where it’s easier to make dynamic interfaces where user preference can rule the day.
Since we can run ios apps on mac now, touch makes sense as the mouse experience is very meh for some apps.
Also, I would have loved a touch screen mac when my job involved building mobile apps.
Finally, I suspect apple will execute UI well on touch, they get to learn from everyone's early mistakes... Vista especially.
Agreed. There has been a long history of the clarity and usability of teams having a single focus. I mean we’re still feeling the negative downstream effects of the “3D touch” last seen on the XS.
For those who are too young to know what I’m talking about: you missed out on a level of elegance and refinement that probably won’t be replicated
Buttons sized to be hit by your physical thumb and buttons sized to be hit by a tiny high-precision cursor are very different things.
I am sitting on a macbook pro with the vertical tab pane open in chrome, with 12 tabs. The outer joint of my thumb covers the entire list, in both width and height. A touch-friendly version of that would be humongous in comparison.
What Microsoft introduced touch surfaces, they came out of the train wreck of Longhorn and they were under the belief that they could push windows down to phones. Reality was that they pushed touch surfaces in a barbell distribution… ultra high end and ultra low end. Mostly low end as screen costs were super high.
With Apple, look at the pencil and the iPad. They’ve had a lot of fits and starts, but the Apple Pencil didn’t fundamentally change the iPad, but it did open the door for a very high value use cases for things like procreate.
I mean the entry level price for this is $2,899, "only" $400 more than the comparable non-touch MBP.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Oled:
Ye Olde:IF memory prices drop, apple product prices will likely drop. And it will stay lighter.
I have an M1 Max but I am not paying 50% more than a few months ago to upgrade.
I have bought Apple laptops since 2004 but I can’t justify the current extortionate pricing, so I’ll sit it out (permanently if need be).
The first gen apple TVs were $300.
The second gen was $99.
The first and second 4k gen were $179.
The third gen was $129.
They might not drop prices on existing models, but they have definitely dropped prices on new versions of product lines.
They then bumped UP the 3rd gen: $249 (+$100) and $199 (+$70).
And the 4th gen has only one option, at $299.
So we've not only "not dropped" prices on the 4K Apple TV, but they've gone up forty per cent.
And you’re right that Apple is hesitant to change prices on models. But that cuts both ways. Apple notably held off of bumping prices across their product line for a considerable amount of time, very plausibly eating the cost of RAM price increases.
It would definitely be atypical but given the unique and extreme nature of the current situation, I wouldn’t be shocked if they cut prices somewhat once the RAM situation relaxes.
They have dropped the price of the MacBook Air a few years ago and the Mac Mini as well. So your statement is categorically false.
That said, with cpu, ram and storage prices the way they are right now, prices won't be dropping soon. But there is hope long term.
All the pricing is bad everywhere.
I hear you though on the cost. The Mac Mini was a killer deal a year ago, especially if you could get it on sale for <$500. Not today though.
If anything, the longer you hold your laptop, the more you amortize the cost, and can more easily afford the next one.
My work machine went from an M1 with 32GB to an M4 with 24GB and it definitely wasn't worth the time to upgrade.
I went from an m1 MacBook to m5 earlier this year. It was almost too smooth - I just felt like I had the same computer and not a new one. Which in a way was disappointing.
I had to prove the OP wrong though; my M1 Max's keyboard died this year, and I had to upgrade to the M5 max this season, after the hikes. I kissed 9k EUR goodbye for something not much better functionally than the M1 Max it replaced, bought for 3.4k Canadian dollars in the wonderful 2021 (that was barely over 3200 EUR back then).
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111945
EDIT:
Yes, 13" ≈ 14"
The form factor of this new 14" PROLED and the old 2019 13" is nearly the same (due to smaller bezels)
I would rather have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports than 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD card slot I won't use, and 1 HDMI port that can only be used for HDMI instead of whatever the hell I need it to be another Thunderbolt port can be.
I would rather have a ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition, which has 3x thunderbolt, SD Card, HDMI, and USB-A, all at the same time with no dongle.
They also let you customize what ports you want in your laptop. You don't have to customize them. You don't have to pull them out. It's still an advantage.
You can also replace your ports easily if they get physical damage.
They can also be used on any brand of machine or even a smartphone. They're just Thunderbolt/USB-C.
They don't take space away from the battery, the battery on the Framework 13 Pro is almost the exact same size as the one in the MacBook Pro 14, and as of the M5 model the Framework 13 Pro gets better battery life than that Mac.
I hazard a guess most users are the same and would prefer having a HDMI / SD card for those moments where you just forgot a dongle while travelling (or, as always happens to me - dongle breaking at the worst moment) and I think the modern MacBook IO is significantly better for it
I would have paid extra to turn it into a USB A port instead.
Because the Dongle-heads do have one thing right, one port that can be turned into lots of other kinds of ports with a dongle is more versatile than a port that can only be a video out, especially when the device doesn't have a ton of room for lots of ports.
Also MagSafe, which the 2019 didn’t have.
or if you want more battery life, iPhone 17 or 17e?
Or if you want even more battery life, iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111883
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126320
Macbook airs are lighter because they are smaller and lack fans (and maybe for other reasons too) so it is not comparable, but it is one of the reasons I like fanless laptops (whatever cuts a bit the weight for mobility is welcome).
It's so bad that the first time I used my M series I thought I needed to RMA it because the display must be broken it it looks this bad, right? Nope.
[0]https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m0zq6aEnGWs/sddefault.jpg
And Steve Jobs sold the plastic MacBooks with their terrible glossy TN display.
But I also only have an m1 16” so it may not be a brand new change
If this was the case, one the one hand they should be criticized for releasing such bad laptops on the market but if they had already decided on developing their own silicon then maybe it made sense to just accept that some generations of Macbook were going to have thermal issues and focus all efforts on the future.
They placed a large bet for the MacBook on Intel’s roadmap at exactly the wrong time, and it screwed up multiple product planning and execution generations as a result.
Edit: I was incorrect, I thought I had clicked the 16" spec page but had not. The 16" MacBook is still at 100 Wh.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/specs/
The 14" went from 72.4Wh to 72.6Wh.
For those not aware, the 100Wh limitation is not Apple, but imposed on them by the airline industry (IATA)[1]
Anything over >100Wh && <160Wh requires airline approval at individual passenger level. Anything >160Wh is classified as dangerous goods and must be prepared and packaged correctly and put in the hold.
[1] https://www.iata.org/contentassets/6fea26dd84d24b26a7a1fd578...
The airline rules are a bit arbitrary. They have allowances for mobility devices but don't seem to take any extra precautions for them when they have bigger batteries. There are still a lot of dangerous gaps in airline safety when it comes to lithium batteries.
They're absolutely arbitrary. From what I've seen, one of the major problems is wild variation in quality. An 80Wh battery from six-random-letters-off-Amazon is going to be more dangerous than a 160Wh battery from a reputable manufacturer.
I think the point is more the amount of energy stored in a fully-charged or 80% charged battery.
In that respect it doesn't matter if your 160Wh battery is from a leading manufacturer or some knock-off factory. 160Wh is 160Wh.
Also the airlines have to draw a line about what level can be permitted without specific permission, what level needs authorisation and what level needs dangerous goods handling.
So suspect the numbers feel arbitrary because its the result of various committees having consulted with various different interested parties and then having the unattractive job of needing to write some rules at the end of it.
It is an inevitable part of the process that some numbers will need to be picked which can easily be explained to passengers, and are workable for manufacturers and the airline industry.
And yet you can carry a 100Wh spare battery and a 100Wh laptop and a 15Wh cell phone...
Ultimately, an 80Wh battery and a 160Wh battery both have more than enough energy for overheating to start a serious fire. The much more important consideration is the quality of the battery controller and the physical protections on and within the battery. And it's also important that many planes now carry burn bags that they can quickly put a runaway overheating battery (or phone or other device) into.
It would make more sense to have a battery certification and require batteries to have that certification in order to carry them on a plane.
Actually not quite. The rules have tightened up significantly on powerbanks.[1]
First the same size rules apply as always, i.e. 100Wh, 100–160Wh with personal individual passenger permission and never above 160Wh.
Second, max two per passenger.
Third, you are prohibited from:
[1] https://www.caa.co.uk/commercial-industry/airlines/dangerous...is the touch part of the display toggle-able? i don't mind a better display but i have no, not a single desire ever to touch it.
- Most OLED PCs were not anywhere as bright as the old MBP miniLED display.
- Almost all OLED PCs have terrible blue shift when viewed at an angle.
- Apple miniLED XDR displays are no slouches either. They are not quite OLED, but they implemented the dimming zones very well with uniform backlighting and deep blacks.
I have not seen Apple's on MBP, but I bet it meets or exceeds iPad Pro Tandem OLED which does not have the two problems above.
So no, it is not the same as the decade old PC OLED. And I have ignored all the potential durability issues.
Also don’t understand the iPhone duo, I’d rather have a normal iPhone and an iPad Air. Cheaper, and better for mobile use and for couch media consumption.
I just got a 16" MacBook Pro with an M5 pro chipset and its total pig compared to my 15.6" HP ZBook Power G8.
The only area I can see where Apple is still holding their own is their UI/UX has always been buttery smooth compared to Windows or Linux. Not a fan the new liquid glass, but its still a very smooth running UI regardless.
I think some of those folks should face some facts:
- The notch on the MacBook Air and Pro lineups is unnecessarily huge and embarrassing. It’s obvious that Apple intended to implement FaceID and couldn’t get it into the notch by their deadline, then they just left the huge notch there with barely any software consideration for it, like how your menu bar icons and menus can just disappear if there isn’t enough room with no recourse.
- There is no design or cost reason for Apple to be this late on offering a touch screen on their laptops. There is no downside to a customer who buys one and doesn’t want a touch screen, they can just disable it.
- The 60Hz displays on the Air are not necessary for any kind of product quality or cost reason and are simply below-par for what you can get on similarly priced Windows laptops. 100% artificial product line anchoring.
- The idea that there was no such thing an OLED display that was “good enough for a MacBook Pro” before 2026 is absurd.
But, that lowest-common-denominator design philosophy gave us innovations like the Butterfly Keyboard, Touch Bar, Dynamic Island, and now a touchscreen. None of those features inspire much faith in Apple's ability to listen to what their users want from the Macbook. Most people I know want a more powerful iPad, not an iPad-like Mac.
Lenovo sells over 2x more personal computers than Apple.
Switching to OLED in 2016 makes zero sense when brightness and burn in issues are not solved.
The only ones that work as a unified product, yes.
It's a fucking laptop. All laptops are "unified products". Stop throwing random jargon to cover up for the lack of merit to your argument.
> Microsoft and Google dabble in hardware and both do nothing but lose money in the hardware area
How is losing money relevant here, you started off the argument by saying Apple is the only vertical computer company left. Which is clearly not true and as your own comment contradicts.
You should try using a Surface Pro once. It is what the MacBook Pro is becoming now, only it is 5 years ahead. Yes, Windows sucks. But, the form factor and its usability is unmatched. I wouldn't just write it off as "dabbling".
When they introduced the Apple Pencil and people were like “haha it’s a stylus”, the thing was decidedly NOT a stylus (it actually couldn’t be used to control some parts of the UI). It was an actual digital pen, something that used to be specialized and expensive external hardware, and it worked beautifully with the iPad. It was literally “stylus but GOOD”. I saw it and thought “people will make memes about this, but Apple totally gets it”.
When they introduced the Vision Pro, VR was just kind of shit. Bulky, ugly, uncool. Vision Pro tried to resolve some of the issues, but it was still kind of half-assed. Like they wanted to have a VR device but couldn’t actually make it work. Good resolution, but not great. Vergence-accomodation conflict not addressed. Still bulky and ugly. Isolation kind of addressed (with the AR-ish UX and the “see-through” display), but not enough.
Now we got the foldable iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook.
Foldable phones are still awfully delicate and the whole concept doesn’t have a clear “killer” use case. There’s no new UX, no new features, it’s just an iPad Mini in a marginally smaller device that’s expensive as hell. Apple didn’t even try to address the obvious shortcomings, they just built the same stupid thing everyone else is failing to sell.
Touchscreen laptops still wobble, they still get covered with fingerprints, they’re still uncomfortable and there’s still no meaningful UX. This thing doesn’t even try to address any of that. Their marketing images literally just show hands hovering above the keyboard and touching the screen for no good reason. They’ve been mocking touchscreen laptops for years now and now they release one like it’s the most obvious thing ever. 1984 vibes.
And the HomeView, which also feels like it lacks a clear “killer” use case.
Maybe I’m just not the intended audience for any of these products, but I’m also starting to wonder if Apple are throwing things at a wall and hoping something will stick.
It doesn't have its own app store. It runs the apps on your phone, so feel free to add any of the 2,000,000+ apps on the iPhone App Store to it.
What things are getting better for you on the software side? I updated from macos 15 (sequoia) to macos 27 (golden gate) on a mac mini m1, and have mostly just received software regressions and worse performance.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/28/apple-executives-touch-...
What would you expect him to do? Come out and say "yeah that thing is shit, really stupid idea, but it was in the product hopper so I dunno we might sell it for a year who cares"?
My idea of a good product has always been that either the product embraces a feature and makes it part of its identity, or the feature shouldn’t really be there. Putting touch on a laptop (“first and foremost an indirect-input device” in their own words) just because sometimes someone might find it a bit more convenient for scrolling is an admission of cluelessness.
First Liquid Glass, then the 17’s design, then ads and ecosystem subscription bloat, then Duo/HomeView, and now the touchscreen Mac. Jobs is rolling in his grave.
Good riddance though.
How come they just released a Macbook Pro yesterday with the latest M6 chip, to release the day after another Macbook Pro with a year old chip?
Why is there not one Macbook and one Macbook Pro?
I hope they find time to address the memory problem. Like they addressed their processor problem and their modem problem.
The Apple Silicon design group can certainly do something about it. And Apple certainly has the money after all, they didn’t squander it on AI models.
That is actually more important, because just recently one of the members of the three-headed cartel said/reiterated again that (memory gouging) is going to last till 2030 and beyond.
I am a dev with a m1 air 16gb and I have 0 reason to update yet, it's been 6 years now, laptops are solved for 90% of people, they need to introduce gimmicks to create demand
Ironic: when they introduced the Apple Watch, the narrative around it was "whatever it will be, it WON'T be just another smartwatch" and yet it was.
Game + Video
Messaging + Browsing
App + Development
Notes + Research
etc
I want to know why I want my phone to cost twice as much and have a dozen delicate moving parts in order to fold. Like the movie quote: “sell me this pen”. I’m waiting for someone to sell me a folding phone. I thought Apple would be able to do it, but they haven’t even tried.
But they aren't iPhones.
Truly unclear what the usecases of each of these new products is however.
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
If I'd never used a laptop before I'd probably do the exact same thing as the kids!
Keyboard and mouse don't give you any more autonomy over the application developers state machine.
I'm not sure I understand the claim of "being in control". The UX is different, sure, often. But that's not "control" over the design of the application.
On a touchscreen, I can tap. That's it. Select? Tap. Move? Tap. Highlight? Tap. The only one that makes sense is draging for moving, but even that's a pain in the butt because it often misinterprets the tap+hold duration that's necessary before it works. When I'm editing text (navigating, cut-n-paste, etc.), it gets what I want wrong more often than it gets it right, I mean like 80/20.
With the phone, they had a green field to design an entirely new UX for touch interfaces, so there's no legacy to blame.
Some people don't intuitively use trackpads so they'll use a mouse and if they discover touchscreens that becomes a feature that needs to come with any laptop after that.
It's pretty eye opening really. If it weren't for seeing someone close to me do it, I'd be in the same camp, wondering who in their right mind would use their laptop like that.
Another possible use is when I want to show some page or content to someone, I always prefer manipulating it with my fingers, instead of "remotely" control it from the trackpad and a mouse.
And if it has stylus support it's cool for drawing (like my current laptop) but Macs do not have a hinge suited for that I think (no 360° support and their focus on a "weak hinge" for the weird and useless obsession from tech content creators of being able to lift the hinge with one finger, something I actually not really value because I sometimes wish that the hinge was stronger and sometimes weaker).
Finally there are also multitouch apps like the piano shown on the presentation and iPad apps I guess, but on macOS I think this matters less (Mac apps are not made with this in mind at all, iPad apps are limited).
Sugar in sodas, burger buns and ketchup for example is linked to type 2 diabetes.
But the point I was making clearly wasn’t about restaurants being healthy. It was about fast food joints being especially unhealthy.
In that case you will end up healthier after a Mcdonalds, too.
You said
> Can’t be any worse than the contents of the food they’re ordering
I think addition of some E coli or whatnot from screen prints makes a McD meal much worse but sure YMMV.
Touch things with your hands. Your body literally needs it to be healthy. Avoiding it ONLY makes you sicker in the end.
But if you’re asking if we should try to cram more than usual in there, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not an immunologist, so I don’t know how easy it is or is not to overload it, nor if it even works for all types of contagious infection agents. Some are probably highly resistant to gastric environments.
I totally agree with exposing immune system...but at the same time, I guess I am weak enough that there is still downtime in the aftermath when I go out into the city(especially during seasonal transitions and when visiting busy packed rooms).
You don't have to have the other extreme of touching every dirty spot especially in a org like mcdonalds which is more likely than not to have people who dont respect basic hygiene. At the same time you dont need the extreme of not touching anything. There is a middle ground.
A touch screen would be actually better than a laptop, but android tablet won't cut it (we make some of the test hardware so are in control of the drivers, but for most of it we don't)
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!
If nothing else, the more complex hinges create significantly higher failure risk.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
Odd feature omissions in Apple-land get debated endlessly just because there are so many random things that Apple arbitrarily decides you can’t do, and the marketing excuse we get is that they’re being intentional or holistic.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
Maybe this is the reason they doing it now
I also always buy the "yoga" version, which flips around and has a pen. Very useful when I need to quickly draw something and have no paper around.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so desired.
Non-touchscreen laptops are an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
I dislike fingerprints too much to feel that temptation, but when using a phone I do feel a kind of dread every time I want to select some text or precisely position a cursor.
I can and do live without it on other devices (my desktop PC), but it's a nice addition that should just be standard equipment everywhere.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
When I have it folded, it's intuitive to use the touchscreen like a tablet. But I wouldn't want to run the i3 setup I have on my desktop. The Wayland UI bandwagon and huge touch targets are for something after all.
I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.
I did find it was handy to scroll with the touch screen occasionally. More an artifact of being a regular iPad user than anything else.
But if I need to do anything else I immediately go to the trackpad or keyboard.
Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.
So it is just table stakes at this point.
I have never had this. I don't think this is the expectation among people using laptops either? Pressing escape is much faster, doesn't obscure the screen, and doesn't require me to aim.
No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!
I have no idea how this keeps getting repeated. No one with a touchscreen laptop is just hovering their arms in front of the screen like a zombie for hours.
It’s another input. You use it when it makes sense. For some, that’s pretty frequent. For others like you, maybe never.
Only the Surface line, as in where the tablet is the main form with an optional keyboard makes sense here.
But it sucks to use application designed for mouse with touch.
So it's not that "touch is bad UX modality" it's "applications should be designed for touch as first class citizen" and by design I mean _proper_ design as in from the ground up not just prettier colors and slihgtly tweaked layout.
This includes a lot of remoting into Windows machines (using Jump) where I use the trackpad more, but the touch is still really nice to have.
My boss wont have a non touchscreen laptop purely for ease of scrolling up and down reports and around spreadsheets
I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.
Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.
But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...
If you lock the screen position with hardware it just lifts the keyboard when you touch just a little too hard.
You need stability for touch and a superlight laptop just does not have that.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
(Like most millennials, she grew up with computers and even works on a desktop every day; there's something about the medium that makes her think "this has a touch screen".)
At this point it's a huge loss to not have it on a display. Don't like it? Then shut up and don't use it. Don't yuck others' yum.
I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).
Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.
It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.
"""
Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?
I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.
Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.
But that's just me, I'm a simple guy. Like and subscribe!
"""
Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.
So this device would not be for me either.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
On Macbooks the trackpad is so large that you can reach it even from the sides of the laptop and the two finger scrolling actually works without second thought.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
I mean just imagine how jarring it is to go from touching the macbook screen to mess with your app to needing to input text. Whether you use the macbook keyboard, or the on screen keyboard, it's just kinda rough.
Otherwise the iPad already has to deal with it, it's not much different.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.
Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
Even now, I find myself resisting the urge to tap things on my Macbook display as it is.
The world moved on. Touch is standard, and Steve Jobs was incredibly wrong with his weird opinions.
This is like people arguing that a computer mouse is not necessary in 1990.
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/apple-intelligence/articles/ergono...
I got my first laptop with a digital pen and touchscreen in 2008 or so. They were rare back then, but nothing groundbreaking new. The touchscreen did suck though.
Now it's a "how will you still need an iPad" problem, that they have solved perfectly because it's a usability problem.
I hope this sells well enough that they might later go the EXTRA step to a Pencil supported 360-hinged MBP.
I'm a hardcore iPad Pro + Pencil lover. And I'm very tired of carrying both a MacBook for the full OS + keyboard, PLUS a whole separate tablet for sketching, illustration, annotation, etc.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
I have a good 88-note hammer action stage piano. I love it for acoustic pianos and it's OK for electric pianos (Rhodes, Wurlitzer) but it sucks a bit for organ, clavinet and synths.
I've seen people play Hammond really, really well on a weighted keybeds but it's much easier to just plug a second cheap(er) synth action controller in for organ parts.
I've never met anyone that really liked playing a tablet screen though. :P
Repliers: stop pretending you make music. You don’t and it shows. Producers are going to love this.
I don't think I'd every want to "play" on it except as a last resort but it could definitely be handy for other virtual interfaces.
Imagine a knob per function synth or a modular setup being able to go straight the control in question would be useful.
- Steve Jobs
Apple: check our new vertical touchscreen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zfir0Ide0A
Same conclusion that everyone has reached over the past four decades, at least. It even got a nickname.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22
Current Apple should show their new tests that demostrate the opposite.
(Edit) The full transcription of the video, faster than watching:
"You know, the first thing you think about is this, right? We thought about this years ago. We've done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo. But after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn't work. It's ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal. Hence, pads. For a notebook, that's why we've perfected our multi-touch trackpads over the years." -- Steve Jobs, 2010
The same kind of people are now doing it again, it will take time but every decision apple has been taking is giving me a bad taste.
even the evolution of macos and IOS. They are much closer to windows and android now.
ESPECIALLY the evolution of macos and ios.
Personally I find I miss touch screen after using my iPad and Magic Keyboard for extended periods and then switching back to the laptop. I mostly use the keyboard but it’s very nice to be able to scroll, position things, etc
Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly
"In addition, a newly designed hinge provides greater stability while using Touch, and advanced video stabilization automatically smooths the camera feed in real time while using Touch on a video call."
A foldable iPhone, macbooks with touch displays, apple watches constantly listening to your conversations, dropping updates for not so old devices like AWU 1, I understand that I am not a target audience for those products but to me this just speaks a lack of vision for the company and their products. I mean this is one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the best people working there and this is the best that we can get a foldable iphone and a touch display I don't believe it.
The last keynote also was probably the worst one I ever saw couple of years ago I couldn't wait for keynotes this year I am totally over them we are at the Tron meme scene where one the board member asked what was new in the new OS version and seems to be just the number - [0]
[0] - Hacking Encom's new operating system – TRON: Legacy (2010) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeh3E67brBs&t=115s
These are the devices people use all day every day. Iterating on them makes sense.
They are also working on AirPods with vision, released a home hub with display, released AR goggles, releasing GPU heavy servers, creating a framework for AI interfaces, …
Are you hoping for a replicator or transporter?
To me making steady progress on well designed core products is very useful.
Personally I’d love better multitasking on my phone which is why the duo is attractive.
- Not solderable components so I can upgrade my machine, ok maybe this is too much I will just take an easy to replace battery. - Longer lasting battery for wearables like watches if the competition can make a battery last 15 days I think Apple can too especially given how efficient the arm chips are in their laptops. - Some hardware design changes Apple watch is literarily the same design since its launch, not to mention that the Apple watch ultra had different shades of orange for the button and the wheel I mean come on. - Software wise I really don't mind the new glass design system but I don't understand why I can't have basic features that an intern can push I literally bought and sold the apple watch like 5 times because I just wanted a simple step counter widget I didn't want a third party app a simple step counter widget and they released it this year 2026 a step counter widget maybe it is harder to do than a replicator who knows.
Not sure why hardware design changes are a good thing on their own. The Apple Watch is well designed I’m not sure what I would improve except battery life and maybe taking the sharp edges off the Ultra.
The demand for change on its own is an odd one for me and not very Apple.
I simply don't understand why the Apple Watch is so pap. My watch lasts all week if I go on holiday, and my wife's is dead won't last much longer than a day.
I really want a fridge with easily replaceable condenser, washing machine with easily replaceable bearing, and a Subaru with great access to spark plugs... You still live in era of 2003 phones where battery was accessible via a flap, but at the same time you want a top tier computer in your pocket and waterproofing. You people are ridiculous sometimes.
this is absolutely never happening
The Mac itself still hasn't proven that it has a place in the future. It's not any more profitable than the iPad in revenue breakdowns, and doesn't come close to the install base of the iPhone. Compared to Windows PCs and Linux servers, Apple has entrenched the Mac as a second-class citizen for traditional computing. Instead of pushing to make macOS an unavoidable flagship operating system, Apple promotes insular API/SDK usage and seemingly leans towards a less-profitable B2C market segment. Tim Cook's obsession over service revenue caused Apple to forfeit the high performance ARM market, which is a shame, since Apple Silicon is quite competitive in ways that the Vision Pro and HomeView will never be.
Once they go down that path, they open themselves up to whatever technology changes and drifts happen in an entirely different market, which right now is going through a tectonic shift with AI. We don't even know what happens in that market in 1-2 years let alone 5 or 10 or more. The business cycles are different, the customers are different, the demands are different. How do you even begin to plan for that?
You're zeroing in on a technical advantage Apple currently has with silicon while ignoring the lack of advantage they have everywhere else in their operation. That'll never happen and it's the antithesis of a half century of company history.
As far as the Mac, it's the truck that does the heavy work so the other platforms like iOS are light [1]. That's been the guiding philosophy, the sandbox it plays within.
[1]: https://youtu.be/ZLEzEL35Iyc?t=2662
> If Apple is going to renege their stupid decisions, now is a great time to find a place for Apple Silicon
Apple's B2C obsession isn't smart. Their service revenue is quite literally deemed illegal and exploitative in several courts, they cannot rely on the App Store and iCloud-style tie-ins forever. The progress that they've made on the A-series chips goes largely unnoticed to a cohort of users that scrolls TikTok and Polymarket. The progress of the M-series chips has not moved the needle on macOS' market share even with 7 years of sales marked down. Right now, they're lining themselves up for the worst of both worlds; being shackled to low-margin B2C products that aren't legally allowed to ammortize costs with lock-in "ecosystem" services. Apple will be forced to make changes if the status-quo continues to punish their business strategy.
So... why not lean into their strengths? iPhone customers will rarely notice fast single-core performance, but devops and enterprises will. Apple fundamentally supports expansion via PCI on Apple Silicon, and their SOCs demonstrably handle Linux, CUDA and Vulkan without any significant bottlenecks. The Mac Pro was 90% of the complete package for a particularly rich type of customer, and Apple refused to invest in the last 10% to uphold a pointless grudge. This stupid decision is why terrible ARM SOCs like Ampere and Grace have dominated the AI buildout even when Apple Silicon destroys them on-paper. Depreciating the Mac Pro is a solipsistic, insane decision that formally abandons Apple's attempts at dominating anything except the prosumer market. This isn't even an Xserve style slip-up, it's a radical steering decision that prevents customers like Pixar from even considering Apple Silicon for a server farm.
> As far as the Mac, it's the truck that does the heavy work
For now. Apple has laid the groundwork for what comes after, though: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
Some facts to consider tho since I think you're underestimating the apple silicon change:
MacOS market share went from 7.5% (2020) -> 9% (2025)
Mac gross margins are harder to estimate but suggest a change from 24% (2016) [1] -> 41% (2025) [2] if you divide profits from revenues. These exclude services.
PC market profit share is >60%, as in Apple get most of the money made in the PC market.
So the idea that apple silicon didn't really move the needle isn't supported. Apple also cares about profit share far far more than market share. Market share can be a liability because of antitrust and supporting less desirable users and use cases. A few decades ago they chose not to get into the Netbook fad when everyone else was because of this philosophy, so its not new.
Apple is certainly ramping up their server hardware as it seems to be angling to run models on their own silicon, and Xcode cloud is a natural extension of that activity. I'm not sure that suggests selling servers or server capacity though. The end result is the same biz model: the people using this server capacity are still primarily individual customers.
The main question about the AI buildout right now is a ton of money is being invested and the returns on that capital are highly speculative. Everyone is investing, sure, but there's a lot of economic headwinds and its unclear where the value will ultimately accrue. If Apple jumps into something, they tend to do it with a decade-long perspective. What you're arguing for is that Apple should have jumped in early, which regardless of B2B v B2C, is not Apple's style.
If apple were to get into that and leverage their silicon advantage, they'd need to significantly increase their supply of silicon. They're already pretty much at capacity serving B2C, and they typically do big capital investments with places like TSMC to build out the capacity they need for nextgen process. Same with ram, probably even more of a limited resource right now. If they were to jump into enterprise in a big way, it wouldn't just be 'make more chips' it would be drastically increasing their capex to expand capacity, and that takes years of lead time to do. The AI buildout is very new, its really all just in the last 2-3 years. I just don't think they could have delivered on this idea right now, based on what they knew in ~2024 and the capacity they have available. If anything their strategy, whether intentional or not, is looking rather prudent. But another month or two passes and maybe that will change too. Things are changing very fast right now.
[1]: https://asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintosh/
[2]: https://asymco.com/2026/03/18/the-biggest-surprise-of-the-ma...
I'd argue the supply chain is a non-issue, too. Apple's chips are a high/low mix, and most of them go to TSMC when they really shouldn't. Apple's A-series SOCs could be manufactured by Intel or Samsung without setting them back too far on fab nodes. Mac chips could remain TSMC products, and Apple could pivot their high-memory SKUs to the Mac Pro form factor instead of forcing it into a non-scalable Studio chassis. That would give them a product that the industry could start to buy again, and they could even offer it as a consumer product if they wanted to thumb up their nose at Nvidia. The current Studio is a sad flagship to sell, reminiscent of the Trash Can form factor with even fewer hardware features.
It's Ternus' choice, and he seems to be open to new ideas. Apple isn't immune to bad decisionmaking though, and I bet that future generations will be confused why the ARM datacenter was dominated by non-entities like Ampere and Nvidia selling low-performance licensed cores.
Sure in the medium-long run they'll still make computer-like experiences that let people learn, create, and work, and those will be enabled by increasing investment in AI infra, but at their heart Apple is a hardware company and must rely on that incredible strength to be the physical embodiment of technology. Robots will be part of the mix of hardware that will do those things, as well as act as an omni-appliance that does all of the other home things (dishwashing, cooking, washing clothes, cleaning, massages, diy crafts, play, walking the dog, etc) as well as entire categories of need like social work, light industrial work, etc. Those are all new markets that Apple could have an incredibly significant role in.
This is why I'm not super bummed that Apple isn't a meaningful AI datacenter hardware player. I think that's just the enabling technology for the markets that Apple really would be the single best company in the world to handle, specifically all of those addressed by the personal robot.
I think Apple will naturally find its way to the personal robot in the next decade. The issue I think they'll struggle more with a cultural one. I think the biggest shift that needs to take place at Apple is an increasing focus on whole-life use cases enabled by AI, rather than hiding behind the idea that third parties are the ones to deliver those use cases. Apps are done, they present walls between use cases where none should exist. And because apps are run by companies that want things that may come at the expense of users, apps also add a great deal of cognitive overhead in terms of dealing with third party brands and motivations, and all the subtle things that the buttons on screen actually mean to the user beyond their immediate function (can i trust pressing this? what does the system behind this button do and does that align with what I want?). Life is a holistic and integrated experience, but the way computers present life, in terms of the many domains various apps occupy, is siloed and untrustworthy. This is the business tension and power struggle I see arising most in the next decades in the consumer software industry.
I agree the Nvidia developer play was something they could have done, and it definitely would have increased shareholder value if they'd had any passion for that kind of work. I don't think it would have cost them too much in terms of who they are either, at least at first. My sense is the personal & small cluster market is an inconsequential market, even though their entrance would have undoubtedly enlarged it. Local models are just a very niche thing, and that has to do with the state of technology not any particular hardware availability. The majority of the effort would have had to been at the datacenter side to capture any significant value, and that's where it would have been a pretty big change in company culture.
Anyway its fun to speculate which paths get them where. I'm swayed by the implicit part your argument which is that the Nvidia play was knowable in advance had they just been engaged with the (mac) pro market more, which is where they would have gotten the signal earlier on AI's growing opportunity.
I think that's likely the logic they operated from inside. Personally, I agree something like the AWU should have been supported longer because longevity is one of the core defining elements of the premium watch market, and thats the market they chose to enter. To Apple's eyes though these are all still 'gadget-like computers' rather than 'computer-like gadgets' [1], and thus the expectations and culture of the fast moving computer industry dominates.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2015/04/the_apple_watch
They worked so hard to "think different", get a following with people that would willingly spend more for a product inferior technically because it was just bold.
i am the first one to appreciate the direction apple is taking, as a customer it will bring even more competition to the windows laptop market because everything will be similar, but when i put my self in steve jobs shoe, i want to puke.
It's a nonissue when you look at the state of macOS attention to detail nowadays, regardless of which side of the fence you're on.
To begin with, yes. The decline only started around ten years ago.
So, it may makes things a little easier for some GUI scripting. I can also see the UX improving for some disabilities, but I know that is merely coincidental rather than intentional.
Same applies to spaces where there's also delay applied before it appears for whatever reason. It would be nice if this fixed (on non-touch Macs as well).
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
Of course, there's the extremely common case of keyboard support being half-assed or missing from GUI apps. But that's not mouse affordances making things worse, that's developers just not having the time or inclination to have great keyboard support.
Whereas, touch affordances seem like they'll be a lot more disruptive.
It used to be: think different
It used to be: It just works…
Now we got “apple intelligence” and subscriptions all over the place and also the lock-in feels stronger over time. Don’t even get me started that one can’t easily replace the battery oneself. They gradually convinced us that reduced repairability is fine.
I got my first MacBook Pro in 2006… things were quite different back then.
Anyway, I’ve decided I wanted to get away from BigTech a while ago. Apple is the hardest part for me. They used to have this annoyance-free usability that I loved so much. iPhone Duo, Touchscreen on the Mac, liquid glass, visionPro, etc. are all valid things to go after and I don’t think these are bad things per se. But it is not what I care about. And clearly the focus has shifted away from the values I used to share with this company about what constitutes a good product.
I took the hit on the ownership/control side because their products were so ‘seamless’.
Now I hope the Framework and Fairphone (with eOS) have matured enough to not regret when I am getting off the Apple-train. I don’t expect a frictionless experience - it just has to be sufficiently annoyance-free. I’ll happily take some rough edges in exchange for greater control and ownership.
“Unfortunately” their products are really sturdy and it will take a while until my M3 MacBookAir and iPhone 14 need to be replaced ^^
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
Basically $400 premium for a screen upgrade. I'm sure the screen is brilliant but mini LED is very much not bad. It's a real bummer that we seem to be entering an era where each year with tech it leans more towards a new product offering that is more but for more money versus getting more for our dollar consistently.
OLED feels pretty established at this point... could they really not have pulled off just making that the default screen on pro's or is this just a price gouge for a premium feature.
Blender definitely benefits from more RAM. The M-series Macs are good for doing renders. If you're a hobbyist or independent creator, you're more likely to be rendering on your laptop than having a fancy render farm. (That's exactly how the movie Flow was done.)
Musicians know software instruments can eat into RAM, and streaming things like sample-based instruments off of disc is non viable for real time audio. Real world use can have very large numbers of tracks with many software instruments and VST chains. Ableton is a minimum of 8GB for the DAW, and things like Kontakt will multiply that fast.
And people usually have Chrome, chat apps and other things open while they work.
(for comparison, M4 pro has 273 GB/s and M1 pro has 200GB/s and M1 max has 400GB/s)
M5 Pro (20-core GPU): 307 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 24 GB, 48 GB, 64 GB).
M5 Max (32-core GPU): 460 GB/s memory bandwidth. (36 GB)
M5 Max (40-core GPU): 614 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 48 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB)
For an M5 max top bin with 128GB Ram:
- mac studio: $5,899.00 (with 2TB ssd bump to match the default macbook sku)
- macbook 16: $7,399.00
Portability gets a hit but I feel you can have a thin client and let the studio do the heavy lifting back at your home/studio(heh).
- The general consensus seems to be that the frontier models are kind of (understandably) "benchmaxxed" towards coding benchmarks and have suffered in some other areas like writing, art, etc. Lot of tweaked/specialized models on huggingface
- Getting around the censorship in commercial models
- While local models don't match frontier coding agents, you can run them for multiple 24/7 with a long running goal (The fans in Macs are presumably not built to run 24/7, but this can be mitigated to a considerable extent IME by simply pointing a desktop fan at it, and you can throttle things in software. On the discrete GPU side of things, you can usually get big power savings without much performance impact by throttling the GPU clock; things are usually bottlenecked on memory)
- Even small 27B/35B models are getting darn good, definitely more than powerful enough for classification etc... you don't need 128GB to run them
- Right now, providers like OpenAI are running at huge losses. At some point, they are going to need to turn a profit, at which point they may get significantly more expensive, and "hosting your own" may make more economic sense than it does today -- and be a valuable professional skill, even.
- Even more speculative: perhaps the future for many applications is training and running your own hyper-specialized models. Right now, training your own is nowhere near cost effective on self-hosted hardware vs. renting GPUs
Note: whether any of these use cases are "worth it" is up to the individual. I'm not trying to sell anybody on the idea. I don't personally do much local LLM stuff at the moment, but it's attractive and I've been close to pulling the trigger...
My raw data alone is terabytes, and it takes hundreds of GB sometimes to run very simple analyses. So there's no way I can have a local AI orchestrating the analyses locally.
But I realize some people have different kinds of data. So I'm interested to hear how exactly people use local models.
The point where it'd make sense for me is if someone makes a compact machine with 512 of unified memory in a couple of years and it costs less than a down payment for a house...
It's more "software & gear discussion" than "use cases", admittedly, I think because the people looking for software/gear discussion already have use cases in mind that they're trying to achieve.
It’s quite evident that the api models can and have been nerfed at the provider’s discretion, then there’s the abliteration aspect too(api models refusing what they consider “harmful”) which makes the case for local.
Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.
But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
Black is 100% the least appealing.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
[1] https://mastodon.social/@allenu/117519656286195439
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZI5uUSdEo
How many Macbook Pro owners are mobile app developers though?
You don’t have to touch it?
I mean it's a $400 up-charge over the same model without touchscreen. Not that unreasonable if you are a heavy app developer IMO.
Easily the best laptop Apple has ever made. You can choose to never touch the screen.
Apple has always positioned the Pro as having the best display in a laptop. Now that’s no longer true.
Are we really moving to 3 tier of laptop displays: Air, Pro, and Pro with ProLED XDR?
That seems unnecessarily confusing for consumers.
“Pro” used to mean you were getting Apple’s best hardware, designed for "professionals".
Now “Pro” doesn't mean that anymore.
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
You have the MacBook Pro with three tiers of SoCs, each with binning options.
There was already an option for screen coatings and now an option for a new screen type.
That’s not to mention storage and RAM choices.
Its still the MacBook with HDR display and active cooling and more inputs. I’m not sure why options are an issue
Up until today, Apple's positioning was:
* Consumer = Air (light workloads, no pro use cases like video where you need best display)
* Professional = Pro (heavy workloads, need best display for color correctness)
After today, it's what exactly? Is it:
* Consumer = Air
* Business = Pro ???
* Professional = Pro with PROLED XDR
The base level has fewer ports / less beefy cpu / less features; right now the 14" M6, but previously dual core, two thunderbolt 13" intel MBPs without touchbar. These are popular with corporate fleets.
The 'real' MBPs have all the ports / beefy cpu / best features / optional bigger screens.
Apple likes its market segmentation but it's not precious about it in the face of big technology shifts. If there's hardware they love and want, they'll try to ship it and sort out the segmentation after.
I don’t think you’re making a compelling argument here. Arguably a processor is more relevant to a wider range of professionals than a screen is.
It's really hard to maintain a perfectly positioned product lineup while managing underlying shifts in technologies. It's usually the availability and price of new components that cause this, along with needing to iron out issues before bringing a technology fully mainstream. Here the touchscreen is new, the hinge is new, and the screen tech is new to the platform. You can't always just drop something that on the mass market.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
I didn’t upgrade before the price hike, and I probably won’t any time soon. Tech prices have gone up across the board, and the worst part is that the same money now buys you a noticeably worse product than it did a couple of years ago, instead of following the old rule that you’d get more for the same price each generation.
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
2. Even better speakers
3. Thinner and lighter while retaining the 100 Wh battery
4. No more notch
Seems like a solid all-around update to be. Other than cellular, I can't possibly imagine what more people could want.
Meanwhile they just added a touchscreen. No new hinge. No new UI. Not even a Pen support.
WTF are they doing?
Presumably adding a feature that doesn't cost them very much or otherwise negatively affect the product, but which some users might like.
It's a negative on the brand because that sort of consistency is something that made Apple.
And there was an answer given by John Ternus:
"The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there's times when it's comfortable and handy to have touch.
We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn't make the product lesser in any way. It didn't make it heavier. It didn't make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we've ever put into a Mac. All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well."
Apple has had more flops than hits in recent years. The Vision Pro, the Glass interface, the Duo hinge flaw that will almost certainly end up with a recall. The Apple Watch always listening, now the bangle touch display with nothing innovative to back it up?
They don't deliver like they used to. I was their fanboy for 10 years and they did deliver the quality and innovation consistently, I just don't see it anymore. The only thing they have going is the CPU.
A 16" M3 Max with 128GB of RAM and no other upgrades would have been $5000 at launch.
They started shipping at the end of 2023, so you couldn't have bought a refurb.
Either you're remembering the price wrong or you got a crazy deal.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
This feels more like a marketing gimmick, anyone remember the Touch Bar?
I think this is the wrong device to start with, though. The demand for touchscreens is probably highest in the cheapest lines. But presumably this will trickle down over the next few years.
Right? ... right? ... wait
oh
oh wait what
wait seriously?
tim. wtf is this shit, tim
More so the one thing I desperately try to get rid of on my MacBook's screen are smudges. Can't imagine this will make it any better.
In the end maybe I'm just completely disconnected from what regular people want in a MacBook. Maybe this comment will be my "love the ambition and thesis" moment.
I think there's a real possibility that AR takes off in the next 1-5 years. The combination of LLMs + smaller AR glasses makes AR a viable computing platform.
For example, simple things like, "Where are my keys?" is a lot easier to solve if (a) you're wearing your AR glasses already and (b) they have access to a frontier LLM.
However, it's very difficult to simulate "touching something" in AR using a mouse/trackpad and keyboard. What if you want to "twist open" a peanut butter jar? I could imagine touching the screen and twisting my fingers in a rotational pattern along the top of the can.
I have a Linux laptop with touchscreen, and my main use is to test the touch interactions on web apps, sometimes Android apps.
Sure it's possible to open it on the phone, but that's an extra step usually not justified.
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
I'm curious to see this in person. Looks like the "PROLED" is not using an RGB stripe layout.
Pixel density can reduce text fringing, but I have not seen a laptop OLED panel that renders text as well as an LCD yet.
The layout shown in that document is quite different.
Nowadays it feels like a gilded copy of existing tech that also failed to find PMF
Moreover they lost sight of excellent UX, each new OS update adds more bloatware and needless "features" while the calendar app weeps in the corner and slow performance and bugs plague the system
i hope there's a linux analog to pro display xdr at which point i can jump ship
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best 2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
iPhone hotspot is slow, unreliable and drains the phone's battery quickly
Luckily i'm in a country where a 600GB 5G plan costs the equivalent of 15$ a month, with 3$ per extra eSIM (watch/computer/car/whatever)
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
But having had to emulate pinch-zoom in an Android emulator has made me wish I had my touch screen laptop back. Emulated touch events also don't work like real touch events, so web dev can also be a bit annoying sometimes.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
I have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a trackpad, yet I rarely use mouse mode on it. Seeing kids interact with laptops for the first time and touching the screen expecting them to work like every other device they use is also probably a sign of the times.
I understand why not everyone likes them, though. Some people prefer to disable their trackpads too, or prefer ball mice, or prefer mouse gestures over keyboard gestures. To each their own. I welcome the diversity.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
How so? I have an M2, carry it in a bag daily but my screen is still pristine
Meanwhile the M1 Air I had for more than 3 years never saw the issue.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
> “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,”
> “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
Remember when he was trying to tell us that the original iPhone having no App Store was intentional, we don’t need it, because we have the best web browser? Yeah, that was just a plain lie because the App Store wasn’t ready.
Or the time he got on stage and acted like the Rokr was a good phone (although you could see through that one a little better).
https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-to-make-a-hackintosh-lap...
(And yes, I know the code got mangled. I don’t run the Vice archives.)
It was fine then, it will be fine now. This is a non-issue.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/apples-15-inch-imac-g3-had-a-3d-t...
And let’s be honest, I bet those of us that use touch screens often enough have instinctively touched their laptops screen trying to scroll it on more than a few occasions, I know I’m guilty of it.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
But touch will go about as well as the touchbar did
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
Remember "gorilla arm"? Icky fingerprints? Toaster ovens?
Good times.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
I guess if users don’t touch it, then you just have to keep trying with something bigger to touch.
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
I have not experienced that at all. I see people touch their touch-capable laptop screens all the time.
I don’t understand how people legitimately hold this belief that no one could or would use a laptop touchscreen. This is exactly how millions of people use their tablets every day. You hold it in your lap and you poke the screen. Or you use the stand to prop it up on a table and you poke at the screen. And shockingly, your arm doesn’t fall off.
Steve would agree: "We've done tons of user tests on this, and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn't work. It's ergonomically terrible."
It's like having a remote control to read your kindle that's sitting on a stand 2 feet away (which, coincidentally, Amazon just announced).
Apparently the Ternus era of Apple is focusing on whether something can be built, not whether it should be released.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
Once I got my MacBook - with it's phenomenal touchpad - this was no longer an issue, and over the years since, I have never, not once, wished it had a touchscreen.
All Apple needed to do was to introduce a MBP variant with an OLED screen, as an option for those willing to risk burn-in to gain perfect blacks, and that's it!
I've always thought the ideal future is to have the phone just be the desktop when docked, if computing advances well enough, and super disappointed this is just some random touch laptop.
The OLED is great as I use a 32" 4k 240hz OLED on MacOS and it has made a huge difference in my eye strain but I don't understand the point of the touch without a proper use for it.
* that you can use the Duo folded 90deg like a mini laptop.
- Touch screen macbook: they were already tapping the screen by mistake sometimes.
- Iphone Duo: they are psyched about this one, maybe the big screen?.
- HomeView: They want this for the kitchen. Because it simplifies things maybe?
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
Anything else?
Haven't been able to use any newer macs :/
I had it very badly on Intel MBP, and now on my M3 Max. I tried some screen protectors, but none of them stuck (pun intended).
I suppose touch only makes it worse?
Windows laptop took the same path, for the better.
is graphene os ready for primetime yet?
It's wild to think that even just 12 months ago, I would have hailed the touchscreen MacBook Pro. Now I don't need much more than an Air. (I also did more video editing back then, whereas now I don't really do it) (and I also want to play games)
(don't care about the touchscreen)
I was gonna get it for the oled (also don’t care about touch screen) but now it’s also for the glowing logo!
How on god's green earth is this worth $2900?
If I needed one of these for my work (I don't) and was going to be using it every day for the next two years, I think I could justify it. It would be about $4 / day which is within reach. Add in the fact that Mac's have decent resale value and the daily expense could be quite a bit less.
And if so, has Apple changed the policy from developer opt-in to automatic on touchscreen Macs.
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
The parent comment was saying "better sound" as one of the upgrades you get for the $400, which is a comparison to the currently available macbook pros.
I often need an alternative interface to the mouse and keyboard. For example, when I want to sketch out an idea. Finding a whiteboard or paper every time isn't easy. So, thanks, Apple. I just hope they'll update the hinge between the monitor and keyboard so I can use it as a tablet. If they do, I'll buy it right away.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
Brothers, there is a market beyond your bash shells!
;p
- removing the MagSafe - adding the Touch Bar
What’s next? Adding a Cut cmd+X shortcut on macOS?
Otherwise this seems like a great upgrade, cant wait to get the M7 Pro version of this next year! (My M1 Pro holds up great for now.)
If only you could run Linux on the damn thing so you could play games now.
Where is the reverse engineering army when you need them lol
Don't take me wrong, OLED displays on a a MacBook screen is quite a nice feat compared to regular the regular displays we have as of today.
Also brightness degradation on especially a tandem oled is unlikely within its reasonable lifespan. Tandem oleds are the literal peak of display technology for this size of panel. Image quality wise, there's no downside.
[0]: https://www.touch-base.com/
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
> Draw. Sketch and annotate directly onscreen.
I would probably never touch the screen with my fingers, but I would draw with it. Would also be really useful during calls.
I do like how they are brining back ports. I think they need to add back the Ethernet port.
And look at all those glorious ports
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
Those greasy finger marks are really going to dazzle like never before.
Dynamic island looks nice.
You'd think Apple would understand the form factor.
What gives?
The entire purpose of the laptop (for me at any rate) is to do real work without the touch screen.
I’m not sure what pro workflows would actually benefit from this vs. a wirelessly paired iPad. I would not pay a dollar extra for touch personally - but that screen does look nice.
I had a Dell OLED 4k laptop 4 years ago that depending on screen brightness would absolutely murder the battery.
Or does one still have to go to Dell for that?
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
Huawei made a Fold laptop that seems to be running Linux already if you're into that.
The price is really high too.
I don't like it, it still will be a popular laptop and within 5 years - one of the best. I am moving away from Apple, thank you for a ride!
The young generation are raised on ipads and smartphones. They expect that each screen is a touchscreen.
If you watch a young kid interacting with a laptop you will see their confusion when touching the screen has no effect.
They refused for decades to put a touchscreen because they know very well it will eat on their ipad sales.
One less reason to get an ipad pro.
All of them at once..wow
It doesn't work.
Steve Jobs said this in October 2010 during Apple's "Back to the Mac" special event, where the company was previewing Mac OS X Lion.
Everything is going down the drain right in front of our eyes.
I can't make sense of any counterargument as anything but copium.
- MacBook Neo
- MacBook Air 13-inch (M5)
- MacBook Air 15-inch (M5)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch (M6)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5 Pro)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5 Max)
- MacBook Pro 16-inch (M5 Pro)
- MacBook Pro 16-inch (M5 Max)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch with PROLED XDR Display (M5 Pro)
- MacBook Pro 14-inch with PROLED XDR Display (M5 Max)
- MacBook Pro 16-inch with PROLED XDR Display (M5 Pro)
- MacBook Pro 16-inch with PROLED XDR Display (M5 Max)
This is so bizarre. I'll never understand Apple fans.
I would be keen to replace my 5k iMac (converted to work as an external monitor) with a 5k OLED monitor!
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
stupid addition to a wonderful product. what is the point having touch screen.
Glowing logo: sure
Touchscreen: nah
What exactly does Apple do different again?
Why are Apple's new product lines so..self-defeating now? I wanted to get the iPhone Duo but it has worse cameras than my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and now this Mac..
Looks like people who want the best of everything will have to skip this year.
I have had touch screen laptop (Dell Inspiron), and boy, it was such a horrible and useless feature. Screen is always greasier than gas-station hot dog.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure their stock is headed for a new ATH.
Especially if they don't even have stylus support
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
Besides holding my arms up it’s also painful to keep my wrists bent to get a better angle for my fingers to articulate.
Really... I would expect this naming from an Onion article.
It being marked as a highlight makes even less sense to me.
Someone help an old graybeard out?
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
So without that, having touch doesn't make any sense and once again, won't buy this unless the second generation of touch Macbooks are available.
Worked well with the first foldable iPhone Duo didn't it? /s