Apple Doesn’t Need A Touchscreen MacBook Pro – It’s Already Got One
Apple Doesn’t Need A Touchscreen MacBook Pro – It’s Already Got One
Publish Date: 2026-02-27 05:20:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
The more touch friendly aspects of macOS have gone
Future via Getty Images
Apple is next week preparing to launch a touchscreen MacBook Pro, if Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is correct. If true, it would be a strange and controversial decision – not least because Apple already has a device that fits that mould perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.
Apple has long denied any interest in adding touchscreens to its MacBook range. In fact, it’s been positively sniffy about the entire concept.
As far back as 2010, Steve Jobs was dismissing the idea of touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible,” claiming that “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
In 2012, Tim Cook also derided Microsoft’s touchscreen Surface laptops, arguing that you couldn’t “converge a toaster and a refrigerator.” And when Apple introduced the (since abandoned) Touch Bar on its MacBook Pro in 2016, then Apple design guru Jonny Ive said a touchscreen wasn’t “particularly useful.”
If Apple has decided to reverse more than a decade of top-level opposition to touchscreen laptops, it’s doing so at a strange time. Although macOS and iPadOS now share the same visual styling, macOS has grown less touch friendly in recent versions.
For example, macOS used to have an iPadOS-like feature called Launchpad, which presented all of the installed apps on a Mac as a grid of touch-friendly icons (as pictured above), very similar to the design of the iPad/iPhone home screen. Apple ditched Launchpad in the most recent macOS 26, replacing it with a much smaller and less finger-friendly Apps pop-up menu.
Little else about the current macOS is touch optimized. As Microsoft has discovered with successive versions of Windows, an interface that is predominantly designed for mouse/keyboard doesn’t translate well to fingers being dabbed on a screen. At best it’s clunky and imprecise, at worst unusable.
Nor do the vast majority of Mac apps lend themselves to touch operation. Yes, developers can make…
