Steve Jobs repeatedly argued that touchscreen laptops fail because they violate basic ergonomics. In 2010, during the launch of the iPad, he explained that vertical touch surfaces cause fatigue over time.
That argument appears to have reached its expiration date. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, and corroborated by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's redesigned OLED MacBook Pro models arriving in late 2026 or early 2027 will include touchscreen displays.
The machines will also feature thinner frames, a hole-punch camera (possibly pill-shaped like the iPhone's Dynamic Island), and M6 chips.
Rumors of touchscreen Macs aren't entirely surprising. Apple appears to have been slowly warming to the idea through its iPad software development. iPadOS has matured considerably in recent years. Stage Manager brought windowed multitasking to its tablets, and Apple already sells a Magic Keyboard that turns the iPad Pro into something resembling a laptop.
Still, there's a significant contingent of Mac users who genuinely don't want fingerprints on their displays, while others have questioned whether this is solving a problem that doesn't exist.
But Apple likely isn't doing this for existing Mac diehards. It's for the millions of iPad and iPhone users who instinctively reach for screens and find it jarring when nothing happens. For them, touch is the expected default.
But whether Apple makes touch feel like a natural extension of macOS or an awkward bolt-on remains to be seen.
