Back in 2010, during a product launch event, Apple co-founder and CEO at the time, Steve Jobs, famously opposed the idea of a touchscreen MacBook, calling it "ergonomically terrible".
He said Apple had done "tons of user testing on this" and concluded that a vertical touch surface "doesn"t work" because after a while, your "arm wants to fall off". It now seems Apple is ready to go ahead anyway and ignore its founder"s wishes.
According to an X post by supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the first touch-enabled Mac will be an OLED MacBook Pro, which is expected to enter mass production by late 2026. These laptops will use on-cell touch technology, the type of screen tech used by companies like Samsung for its Galaxy smartphones.
Kuo adds that a more affordable MacBook powered by an iPhone processor, slated for the end of 2025, will not support a touch panel. The second-gen version of that machine, anticipated for 2027, could include touch support. Kuo believes Apple is making this change after observing how iPad users work, concluding that touch input can enhance productivity.
This is certainly not the first time we"re hearing of a touchscreen Mac, as back in 2023, Bloomberg"s Mark Gurman reported on a similar plan, claiming that Apple"s engineers were "actively engaged in the project."
Of course, Apple has experimented with touch input on the Mac before with the Touch Bar (RIP!). Introduced in 2016, the Touch Bar was a thin OLED strip that replaced the traditional function keys. Its controls changed depending on the app, so a word processing app would show options for bold or italics.
macOS Tahoe launched recently with a new Liquid Glass design language that seems built for touch. You see it in the larger window controls and the rounder corners on everything. There is also a lot more generous padding around interface elements, making buttons bigger targets to hit. Could this be Apple preparing its desktop OS for a touch-first future? Nobody outside of Cupertino knows for sure.
What we do know is that the company has been steadily "blurring the line," in Kuo"s words, between the iPad and Mac. The biggest leap happened in 2021 when the M-series chip was introduced to the iPad Pro. Software followed, with iPadOS 16 getting Stage Manager for a more desktop-like windowing system.
The more recent iPadOS 26 pushes this even further with a full-blown windowing system, complete with the classic red, yellow, and green "traffic light" controls and a proper menu bar.
Let"s also not forget Universal Control in macOS Monterey, which allows you to use a single mouse and keyboard across both a Mac and an iPad, seamlessly dragging files between them.