Apple’s new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display is the first Mac with a touchscreen, and Apple is pitching tapping, scrolling, and pinching to zoom as “a whole new way to interact with your work.” Windows laptops have supported these gestures since Windows 7 in 2009, while Apple executives spent the next decade and a half explaining why touch didn’t belong on a Mac, including John Ternus, who now runs the company.
Ternus defended the Mac’s touch-free design five years ago to the day. Now, he says, “You’ve gotta touch it to believe it.”
Really? I mean, I’ve been believing since 2012…
Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro ad explains touch like it’s 2007
Apple’s announcement on October 28, 2026 calls it “Touch for the first time on Mac,” and the launch video’s description tells you the display is so good that “you’ll want to reach out and touch it. And now, you can. Tap, swipe, scroll, and pinch to zoom directly on your screen.”
The product page is hilariously explaining each gesture as if we haven’t seen touchscreen laptops before. Scroll is “Move through content by sliding your finger across it.” Zoom is “Pinch to zoom in on photos, documents, web pages, and more.” The section is titled “Magic on tap.” There’s nothing magical here, Apple!
Apple also says the touch sensor is “built directly into the display panel” and “not layered on top of it,” which reduces latency. Samsung Display announced OLED laptop panels with touch sensors built into the panel in January 2023, and offered them to other laptop brands. Again, not a new technology.
That said, the display is excellent. The tandem OLED panel hits 2,000 nits peak brightness with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and the MacBook Pro got lighter and thinner while adding touch. It’s great, but what’s not is the way Apple tries to sell them.
Apple is using a marketing trick from decades ago
SPOILER ALERT: In the very first episode of Mad Men, Lucky Strike’s owners explain how their tobacco is grown, cured, and toasted. Don Draper stops them at “toasted,” because that’s the ad. Everyone else’s tobacco is poisonous, but Lucky Strike’s is toasted (as if that makes it less poisonous!)
The funny thing is that heating tobacco was common practice across cigarette makers. Advertisers call this a preemptive claim, where a brand talks about a common feature first, so it starts to look like its own. Claude Hopkins did it over a century ago, selling Schlitz beer in sterilized bottles that other breweries also used, and “It’s toasted” was a real Lucky Strike slogan from 1917.
Apologies for the mention of old Cigarette and Alcohol ads, but there’s a reason why those sold in millions, and Cupertino is planning the same.
Apple is doing this with touch. For a Mac user who hasn’t used a touchscreen laptop, it’s toasted.
Apple executives said touchscreen Macs were a bad idea for 16 years
Steve Jobs said in 2010 that “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical,” and that “your arm wants to fall off.” Of course, Jobs couldn’t have been more wrong here.
Last week, as Apple prepared to launch the touchscreen MacBook Pro, ex-Windows boss Steven Sinofsky didn’t let the double standards slide, as he mocked the naysayers who suddenly changed stands.
When an analyst asked whether Apple would merge tablets and laptops like Microsoft was doing with Windows 8, Tim Cook said in April 2012, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those aren’t going to be pleasing to the user.”
Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi told CNET in 2014 that the “Mac is sort of a sit-down experience,” and that Apple “experimented with all the technology, but we found it just wasn’t good.” In 2016, he said, “Grafting touch onto something that was fundamentally designed around a precise pointer really compromises the experience,” while Phil Schiller said about touch and pointer input, “You can’t optimize for both.”
By 2018, Federighi was calling touchscreen laptops “experiments,” and said “lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do.”
Then, in October 2021, Ternus, who was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, told The Wall Street Journal, “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad. It’s totally optimized for that. And the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven’t really felt a reason to change that.”
John Ternus now says touch on a Mac is “comfortable and handy”
When WIRED’s Steven Levy asked Ternus whether Apple was breaking its touchscreen taboo, his answer was, “Who knew?”
“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,” Ternus said. He added that Apple “needed to get to a point where adding touch didn’t make the product lesser in any way.”
While on the new CEO, let’s not forget the old one’s new vision. Tim Cook tweeted: “We brought Touch to the Mac!” Sure, you have. It’s been here all along.
Marketing chief Greg Joswiak said, “There’s a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch.” Of course they do. They grew up on iPhones and iPads, and many of them on Windows laptops with touchscreens!
So, what changed, the technology or Apple’s priorities? According to Bloomberg, Apple hopes premium features will help it charge more, and the touch MacBook Pro starts at $2,899. Well, the technology matured in the past decade…
Microsoft sold this idea with Windows 8 and Surface years ago
Windows 8 built its whole interface around touch in 2012, and Microsoft followed it with the Surface Pro. At the Surface Pro 4 launch in October 2015, a CAD model of a toaster-fridge showed up in Panos Panay‘s demo, a dig at Cook’s comment.
Today, touch is so ordinary on Windows that Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra announcement mentions its “PixelSense Ultra touchscreen” once, in passing. Add the flips, 2-in-1s and detachables from every major OEM, and Windows hardware is miles ahead in form factors.
As someone who once promised himself he’d buy a Surface Studio after watching its launch video, I’m sad Microsoft didn’t double down on hardware. And Apple is still ahead where Windows OEMs keep cutting corners, with six speakers with force-cancelling woofers and a 12MP Center Stage camera on the new MacBook Pro PROLED XDR.
Windows laptops had touch first, but that won’t stop Apple from making it look new. What Windows OEMs can do is fix their speakers and webcams (and build quality in general), because touch no longer sets them apart from a MacBook.
