Steve Jobs said touchscreens did not belong on laptops. 16 years later, Apple has one—meet the new MacBook Pro

In 2010, Steve Jobs had a fairly definitive view on touchscreen laptops. Apple had conducted extensive user testing, he said, and had found that touchscreens did not belong on notebooks because users were forced to repeatedly reach up from the keyboard to touch a vertical display. “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical,” Jobs said at Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event, arguing that after prolonged use, “your arm wants to fall off.”

Sixteen years later, Apple has effectively reversed that position.

The company has introduced its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, bringing Touch to the Mac for the first time. The move comes under new CEO John Ternus, who told WIRED that the Mac remains primarily an indirect-input device built around the keyboard and trackpad, but that “there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.” Apple’s chief hardware officer Johny Srouji, meanwhile, offered perhaps the simplest explanation for why the company changed course: “Ten years is a very, very long time.” He said display technology, custom silicon and software architecture had changed enough to finally “meet our bar.”

The timing, however, also makes Apple’s move difficult to describe as pioneering. Touchscreen laptops have been a part of the Windows PC ecosystem for years, with Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Acer among the companies that have built touch into notebooks and 2-in-1 machines. WIRED notes that customers have already bought touchscreen laptops from these manufacturers, while Reuters, citing IDC data, reported that 33.4 million touchscreen notebooks were shipped globally in 2025. The average selling price was around $1,009, considerably below Apple’s new machines.

In other words, Apple is entering an established market rather than creating one. The company’s argument is that it has waited until it could do touchscreen computing on its own terms.

Apple’s answer: Touch, OLED and M5 Pro

The new MacBook Pro comes in 14-inch and 16-inch versions and introduces Apple’s PROLED XDR display, based on tandem OLED technology. Apple claims up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR and SDR brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a 120Hz variable refresh rate and support for both P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces.

The touchscreen itself is integrated into the display panel rather than being layered on top, which Apple says reduces latency. Touch can be used for everyday actions such as scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, dragging content and arranging windows. Apple is also positioning it as a professional tool: designers can use the display as a canvas, musicians can play software instruments on screen and developers can test touch functionality for iOS and iPadOS apps directly on the Mac.

The new machines run on Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, with configurations offering up to 128GB of unified memory and 16TB of storage. Apple claims up to 24 hours of battery life, while the redesigned machines weigh about three pounds for the 14-inch model and four pounds for the 16-inch version. They also get a redesigned hinge intended to reduce movement when users press the display.

In India, the touchscreen MacBook Pro starts at ₹3,49,900 for the 14-inch M5 Pro model. The 16-inch M5 Pro starts at ₹4,09,900, while the M5 Max versions start at ₹5,49,900 for the 14-inch model and ₹5,89,900 for the 16-inch model. Apple says pre-orders began on October 28, with availability from November 6.

But Apple’s premium positioning becomes particularly stark when placed alongside established touchscreen machines.

Lenovo’s Yoga 9i 2-in-1, for instance, has evolved through several generations into one of the strongest premium touchscreen convertible laptops. The latest 2026 model carries a 14-inch 2.8K OLED touchscreen with a 30-120Hz variable refresh rate, 500-nit sustained brightness and 100% DCI-P3 coverage, alongside a 360-degree hinge and pen support. And multiple reviews describe it as one of the few genuinely premium laptop-first 2-in-1s available today.

The comparison is not entirely apples-to-apples—the Yoga is a convertible designed around touch, while Apple’s MacBook Pro remains fundamentally a professional clamshell laptop. But that distinction is precisely the point. Lenovo and other PC makers have spent years working out the ergonomics and software implications of putting touch into laptops. Apple’s new proposition is that it can now deliver a superior version without compromising the traditional Mac experience.

HP’s current OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 makes the same point from another direction. It offers a 3K OLED multitouch display with a 120Hz refresh rate, up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB configurations and a 360-degree design. HP lists the machine at ₹2,24,499 in India, substantially below Apple’s ₹3,49,900 starting price for the touchscreen MacBook Pro.

That does not make the HP or Lenovo a direct replacement for the MacBook Pro’s M5 Pro/M5 Max performance. But it does underline the reality Apple is stepping into, that consumers have had multiple touchscreen laptop formats to choose from for years, and many of those machines cost considerably less.

A different Apple under John Ternus?

The touchscreen MacBook Pro is therefore more interesting as a signal about Apple than simply as a new Mac. Ternus became CEO only recently, and his early tenure has already been marked by hardware that pushes Apple into areas where it previously exercised considerable restraint. The touchscreen MacBook Pro follows the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone, suggesting a willingness to revisit product categories and design assumptions that the company had historically avoided.

The Duo, however, shows why entering a mature category is not enough. Apple’s foldable has received strong attention for its design and inner display, but early criticism has focused on compromises including its outer screen and price. More significantly, reports of cracked inner displays have emerged, with Apple acknowledging that a small number of units have been affected.

That makes the touchscreen MacBook Pro an important test of Ternus’s hardware strategy. How will this latest offering by Apple work out, that too will soon unfold. For now, the company has finally leveled up with it competition, albeit late. But like the saying goes, "Better late than never."