Apple Said No to Touchscreens for 16 Years. Now It Sells One for $2,899.

Song "VERTICAL" — crunk, three minutes twenty seconds, one story.

On October 28, 2026, at an event in Los Angeles called "Pro and tell", Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, the first Mac with a touchscreen 1. Pre-orders opened that day and it goes on sale Friday, November 6, starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch 2.

The screen is what Apple calls a PROLED XDR: two self-illuminating OLED layers stacked into one panel, up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a 120Hz refresh rate 1. The touch sensor is built into the display panel rather than layered on top of it, which Apple says cuts the delay between your finger and the picture, and the company redesigned the hinge so the screen holds steady under a finger 1. The Dynamic Island arrives on the Mac for the first time as the home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI, and the glowing logo is back on the lid 12. The 14-inch weighs 3 pounds and the 16-inch weighs 4, both lighter than the models they replace 1.

Then there is the part that makes it a story. Apple spent sixteen years saying this was a bad idea. In 2010 Steve Jobs put it this way: "We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible." 3

In 2012 Tim Cook, asked why the tablet and the laptop would not converge, said: "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user." 2 In 2015 Phil Schiller, then the marketing chief, gave Wired's Steven Levy two reasons it could not work. The first was ergonomics: "we believe that on a desktop scenario, where you have a fixed keyboard, having to reach up to do touch interfaces is uncomfortable." The second was software: iOS was built for fingers, macOS for a cursor and small close boxes, and "these two worlds are different on purpose." 4 A year later, at the Touch Bar launch, he said "You can't optimize for both" and that Apple had tested touch anyway: "What the heck, we could be wrong. We've absolutely come away with the belief that it isn't the right thing to do. Our instincts were correct." 4 The Touch Bar itself arrived in 2016, gave way to physical function keys in 2021 and was dropped entirely in 2023 2. In 2021 John Ternus told the Wall Street Journal the Mac was "totally optimized for indirect input" and that Apple had not felt a reason to change that 4.

What changed, in Apple's telling, is that touch stopped costing anything. "We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn't make the product lesser in any way. It didn't make it heavier. It didn't make it thicker," Ternus, now Apple's chief executive, told Wired 4. Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, says the touchscreen laptops already on sale wobble when a finger presses them, which is what the new hinge is for, and that he likes his engineers "gated by physics, not imagination or timelines" 4. Greg Joswiak, who holds Schiller's old title, puts it more simply: "Most pros own an iPad, and almost every pro owns an iPhone. So this is something that they're natural with. There's a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch." 4

The first hands-on is less tidy than the launch. The Verge found the screen "can wobble pretty easily with some firm taps toward the top of the screen," and that in third-party apps which have not been updated, a tap falls back to a click, so small buttons can be "fiddly" or "infuriating" 5.

The bill runs further than the sticker. A fully specced 16-inch costs $14,549, against $10,149 for the previous model at its maximum; $7,000 of the difference is a new 16TB storage option and $2,000 of it is 128GB of memory 6. The other MacBook Pros Apple announced the same week run the newer M6 chip; this one runs M5 Pro or M5 Max 2.

Nobody has reviewed one yet. Wired's Steven Levy, in a demonstration, called the blacks the deepest he has seen on a computer screen 4. Whether $2,899 is worth it depends on what you do all day, and Apple will not say whether touch reaches the MacBook Air or the iMac 4.

Reporting cut off at October 29, 2026. The first reviews, or touch arriving on a cheaper Mac, would be the next episode.