Apple Finally Puts a Touchscreen on the MacBook Pro: Jobs Called It 'Ergonomically Terrible,' and Apple Did It Anyway
Steve Jobs famously called touchscreen laptops "ergonomically terrible," and Apple refused to make one for over a decade. Today, it made one.
Three key facts
Apple released the first touchscreen laptop in its history, the MacBook Pro. According to The Verge's hands-on, the new 14-inch model has a PROLED XDR display and weighs just 3 pounds, noticeably lighter than current non-touch models (the newly introduced M6 versions start at 3.4 pounds); the 16-inch comes in at about 4 pounds, versus 4.7 for the non-touch M5 Pro. The body is also slightly thinner with a marginally smaller footprint.
The touch approach is "translation" rather than a rebuild. In Apple's own apps, you can swipe on the screen to scroll web pages, pinch to zoom, and double-tap to maximize a window; third-party apps may need updates for full support, but macOS translates taps to clicks as a fallback, so they shouldn't be useless.
One sentimental detail is back: the glowing Apple logo. The report calls it a small feature that visibly excited the audience at the launch; its brightness tracks the screen and can be turned off entirely. Screen saturation and contrast are described as "remarkable."
Wang Dou's Take
Start with the most interesting part: none of Apple's original reasons for rejecting touchscreen laptops have changed — lifting your arm to poke a screen still hurts your shoulder. So this launch didn't "solve" anything. It just finally admitted something else: users care less about ergonomics than about "can I just tap it."
More telling is the weight. The touch version is lighter than the non-touch one — 0.4 pounds lighter at 14 inches, 0.7 at 16. That says Apple didn't just glue a touch layer onto an old chassis; it remade the body. Touch isn't "adding a feature," it's a platform-level redo. For a product that hasn't changed form in over a decade, that move carries far more weight than the words "supports touch."
Third, that glowing logo. It has zero technical relationship to touch, but everything to do with positioning — Apple is reminding you that this machine isn't like the Macs of recent years that drifted toward being pure tools. It wants to be wanted again. When a product line starts reaching for sentimental details to find its presence, it usually means the line is at a point where it needs a new story.
As for whether touch is actually practical, I'm skeptical. The Windows camp has tried for over a decade and concluded: occasionally useful, mostly you still use the trackpad. Can Apple do better? Maybe. But more likely — it finally discovered that what users want isn't a better input method, but the reassurance that they haven't fallen behind.
Source: The Verge Hands-On · The Verge