Everyone's focused on the touchscreen, but I'm seriously impressed how they managed to cut down the weight.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Sounds like maybe the Macbook Air could become the original 12 inch Macbook(2015) weight eventually. They might even re-introduce a 12 inch model. Imagine that!
Thats a side effect of the 1000+ dimming zones no? I snagged this ASUS ProArt display that was Professional Grade on eBay and among its many flaws is that its 1000+ dimming zones result in blooming whenever you have bright items on top of a complete black background. Makes it terrible for horror movies. :/
They might have changed the internal fan layout. If you look it AR mode, you can look underneath the display , there’s usually two fan exhausts there, this one has only one
But I also only have an m1 16” so it may not be a brand new change
Macbook airs are lighter because they are smaller and lack fans (and maybe for other reasons too) so it is not comparable, but it is one of the reasons I like fanless laptops (whatever cuts a bit the weight for mobility is welcome).
TBH this is one of the things that will be a clear downgrade imo. Weight reductions are thinness are not free. The Pro and Max chip version are already over powered for the cooling system the current macbook pros have. And now they are further cutting into the laptop...
Not sure why this is downvoted but it is a valid concern. I will wait and see some thermal testing as someone mentioned on new cooling design which I can't find on the page just yet.
The display change itself likely accounts for some of the thickness and weight reduction. The mini-LED backlight grid on the previous displays wasn't nearly as thin or light as an OLED panel.
Welcome to 2016. Lightweight OLED displays have been in the market since a decade ago, but now we are praising Apple for catching up 10 years later for a laptop with a "pro" moniker? Damn, the Apple ass-kissing here never disappoints.
Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops? I've never really been drawn to wanting to do that. My mouse is far more accurate and doesn't block my view. But maybe it's just because I don't have it and I would find tons of uses for it. Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen. I guess I can understand for testing iOS/iPad apps but past that I just don't see myself wanting to use that.
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
I can’t be the only one who recoils in horror at the thought of TOUCHING THE SCREEN! It’s like going to the toilet and not washing your hands after. I’m sure people do it, but..ew.
Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
This is how my 8-year-old works on her school Chromebook. And all of the kids at her school that I've seen using laptops are similar. Touch the screen to interact, type on the keyboard. I think they're just wired to believe every screen should be touchable and go with whatever is easiest for them in the moment.
Yes unless you've seen nontech people use a touchscreen you won't get the appeal.
Some people don't intuitively use trackpads so they'll use a mouse and if they discover touchscreens that becomes a feature that needs to come with any laptop after that.
I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a couple of years ago for my linux laptop and had been using it for months before I realized when I was wiping a smudge off of the monitor that it was a touch display! It was quite the surprise. I have yet to find it of any value.
In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
I'm not the target for this particular product either and you and I use our MBPs in pretty much identical ways. I will say though, if the laptop's hinge allowed reverse clamshell like the Yoga, then I would consider the premium for a feature I would rarely use. I like the idea of a tablet, but any time I'm seated with one, I'm either doing something I'd do on my phone or doing something that I'd rather be doing on my computer running a desktop OS.
Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!
The set of people who use convertible laptops in tablet mode seems tiny. It’s one of those things that looks like a great idea but doesn’t pan out in real life. Everyone uses it once, says “cool” and never uses it again. 13” tablet that weighs as much as a laptop is not a great form factor.
Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
My work laptop has a touchscreen.
I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.
It's expectation. Think of all the screens in your life that you interact with and when you can't touch them it feels broken (at least to me). So I don't use my laptop as a tablet but when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button. Or I'm helping someone with a task and reaching to move a window directly is natural.
> when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button
I have never had this. I don't think this is the expectation among people using laptops either? Pressing escape is much faster, doesn't obscure the screen, and doesn't require me to aim.
For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.
Windows benefits from a touchscreen more often on something like a diagram where you'll be panning around up/down/left/right, zooming, etc because the trackpad situation isn't very good.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
> As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.
Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.
I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.
I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.
I actually disable touch screen in bios on my Dell XPS13 because I don't like touching it accidentally but then I'm not the target market for a touchscreen laptop.
I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.
I use it constantly. No one actually holds their hands up to the screen for extended periods of time. But touching the screen to click a button can be more efficient than tabbing or mousing to it. Especially if the laptop is on your lap.
Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.
It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing
I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts
I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.
The only reason I would want touch is if the screen would fold and rotate in order to turn it into a tablet. If Apple made this in a 12-inch format (like their old 12-inch MacBook I'd buy it immediately.
No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!
> No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare.
I have no idea how this keeps getting repeated. No one with a touchscreen laptop is just hovering their arms in front of the screen like a zombie for hours.
It’s another input. You use it when it makes sense. For some, that’s pretty frequent. For others like you, maybe never.
It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.
I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.
I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.
I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.
I don’t have a dedicated tablet, and use a touchscreen laptop that’s “folded back” in lieu of that. It’s not as good but cheaper than two devices. To me it’s inherently a budget tool. An €3300 touchscreen laptop doesn’t really compute.
I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.
I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)
Something wrong with your computer. My 11 year old XPS13 with touch screen has worked fine in Linux ever since I got it. And same with my Surface Pro 2 running Ubuntu.
I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.
I hate it. It's beyond me why people would intentionally smudge their laptop display.
I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).
Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.
Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
I want to argue that there’s been 15 years of UI experimentation since then. Occasional use is okay, but should be absolutely optional. As long as we don’t all get scammed to use touch as the primary UI like we did in cars.
My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.
I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.
It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.
I have a Macbook Pro 14 first gen and I love this machine but watching what Apple is doing lately I think they are starting to loose the plot.
A foldable iPhone, macbooks with touch displays, apple watches constantly listening to your conversations, dropping updates for not so old devices like AWU 1, I understand that I am not a target audience for those products but to me this just speaks a lack of vision for the company and their products. I mean this is one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the best people working there and this is the best that we can get a foldable iphone and a touch display I don't believe it.
The last keynote also was probably the worst one I ever saw couple of years ago I couldn't wait for keynotes this year I am totally over them we are at the Tron meme scene where one the board member asked what was new in the new OS version and seems to be just the number - [0]
Exactly what i was thinking, with these decision they are making a quick bucks but in the long term apple will just be another washed and forgetful brand like most of the windows brand, and then what reason to get a macbook ?
They worked so hard to "think different", get a following with people that would willingly spend more for a product inferior technically because it was just bold.
i am the first one to appreciate the direction apple is taking, as a customer it will bring even more competition to the windows laptop market because everything will be similar, but when i put my self in steve jobs shoe, i want to puke.
I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
It would be interesting to know what ThinkPad model it was. The older ones had pretty small trackpads so they were difficult to reach.
On Macbooks the trackpad is so large that you can reach it even from the sides of the laptop and the two finger scrolling actually works without second thought.
I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.
Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.
I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.
The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.
I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)
When they introduced the Apple Pencil and people were like “haha it’s a stylus”, the thing was decidedly NOT a stylus (it actually couldn’t be used to control some parts of the UI). It was an actual digital pen, something that used to be specialized and expensive external hardware, and it worked beautifully with the iPad. It was literally “stylus but GOOD”. I saw it and thought “people will make memes about this, but Apple totally gets it”.
When they introduced the Vision Pro, VR was just kind of shit. Bulky, ugly, uncool. Vision Pro tried to resolve some of the issues, but it was still kind of half-assed. Like they wanted to have a VR device but couldn’t actually make it work. Good resolution, but not great. Vergence-accomodation conflict not addressed. Still bulky and ugly. Isolation kind of addressed (with the AR-ish UX and the “see-through” display), but not enough.
Now we got the foldable iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook.
Foldable phones are still awfully delicate and the whole concept doesn’t have a clear “killer” use case. There’s no new UX, no new features, it’s just an iPad Mini in a marginally smaller device that’s expensive as hell. Apple didn’t even try to address the obvious shortcomings, they just built the same stupid thing everyone else is failing to sell.
Touchscreen laptops still wobble, they still get covered with fingerprints, they’re still uncomfortable and there’s still no meaningful UX. This thing doesn’t even try to address any of that. Their marketing images literally just show hands hovering above the keyboard and touching the screen for no good reason. They’ve been mocking touchscreen laptops for years now and now they release one like it’s the most obvious thing ever. 1984 vibes.
Their demo example for the touch interface is piano keys? That's a 2010 Scott Forstall level of skeuomorphism that doesn't translate well for a laptop screen because it's not convenient.
The hands are also almost in the exact same image Steve Jobs had on a slide during the iPad keynote showing touch on a laptop is not ergonomic. It's poetic, almost.
"We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work," Jobs said at the company's "Back to the Mac" event in 2010. "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," Jobs continued. "It doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible."
Yeah, piano playing was a bad example. There’s a reason MIDI keyboard manufacturers try so hard to replicate the weighted feel of a real piano. Your fingers need feedback.
An interesting aside here, there is no one, true style of action for keyboard instruments and no one, true type of feedback.
I have a good 88-note hammer action stage piano. I love it for acoustic pianos and it's OK for electric pianos (Rhodes, Wurlitzer) but it sucks a bit for organ, clavinet and synths.
I've seen people play Hammond really, really well on a weighted keybeds but it's much easier to just plug a second cheap(er) synth action controller in for organ parts.
I've never met anyone that really liked playing a tablet screen though. :P
As a longtime laptop musician, using the QWERTY keyboard to play notes in the absence of a MIDI controller is infinitely preferable to this goofy demo.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
Reminds me of that stupid DJ demo of the touch bar. Did any DJ actually use that in practice? Well if they do they better hold on to their now vintage MacBook.
I agree that a piano demo seems like a bad idea. But damn if I don’t daily long for the iOS 6 days where buttons and tappable areas were well defined and there were some fun and whimsy to the interface. As compared to the flat unintuitive desolate landscape of recent years. I would rather have a big animated cassette deck in my music player than the current overly polished full page advert I get every time I open the app. At least Forstall and his team cared enough.
How is it convenient? A pro workflow is not holding your arm with the finger up in the air trying to avoid accidental taps, when you can get a small 25 key akai midi controller for a 100 usd. And it's easy to carry around and comes with velocity-sensitive keys and pressure-sensitive pads.
What's the point of a touch display if the laptop doesn't have a 360 hinge !? The interaction looks very awkward and unless they stiffen the hinge compared to previous model, the thin screen will keep tilting backwards.
My wife sits on the couch, "indian style", with a laptop in her lap angled at about a 45 degree. She holds the edges of it with her arms, and brings the keyboard up to her stomach kinda...
Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly
There's no universe this doesn't negatively affect the UX of the OS for non-touch users. You can't simply support (or rather you can half-arse) new affordances without contorting the rest of the already well worn paths.
I can actually see a possibility where this improves UI/UX a bit. One being the removal of some many hover-over UI elements, e.g., the (x) button on notifications do not display unless a mouse is hovering over the notification badge.
So, it may makes things a little easier for some GUI scripting. I can also see the UX improving for some disabilities, but I know that is merely coincidental rather than intentional.
Windows did this seemingly by not caring that it's also a touch screen, so not everything in the system is touch-friendly. It's still fine for many situations.
Density is way down on UI elements for one. OS X used to feel like a Workstation. With every release macOS feels closer to a toy. Touch is great for convenience, but not getting into the weeds with “real” work.
Er… Yes they have. Liquid Glass is awful. It’s not only ugly (that’s preference, though), it has definitely negatively affected the UX. That’s why they’re adding sliders and options and reversal left and right.
I'm still on Sequoia for this reason. I want a UI optimized for displaying text content and mouse and keyboard control. Mostly keyboard. I definitely don't want the larger border radius on the windows that would seem to be designed for touch.
Isn't that his point though ? Their plan seems to half-ass touch support (i.e. the menu bar, minimize/close buttons, etc. all stay in their current size), so it seems like a waste of hardware to include a touch screen just for very little functionality. If instead they make the UI friendly to fat fingers, they'd very much affect the mouse/trackpad experience.
Does that mean you also believe the same to be true for mouse affordances ruining it for keyboard users and vice-versa? Or "touch" is special in this regard?
I can't think of cases where mouse affordances necessarily, intrinsically make things worse for keyboard users.
Of course, there's the extremely common case of keyboard support being half-assed or missing from GUI apps. But that's not mouse affordances making things worse, that's developers just not having the time or inclination to have great keyboard support.
Whereas, touch affordances seem like they'll be a lot more disruptive.
Mouse affordances don't usually ruin it for keyboard preferrers. Keyboard shortcuts and control are often an afterthought or downright written off because "they can just click" but thats down to laziness or lack of care than some hard and fast rule. However, a keyboard affordance is usually invisible, and a mouse affordance isn't, so they can very happily co-exist without affecting one another. For instance, the Alt modifiers in menus in classic Windows, those have almost no effect at all on anyones ability to click the menu item with a mouse.
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
Touch is probably not going to be useful in most contexts, but there are two things that come to mind:
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
Not letting the screen bend back all the way neuters every avantage of touch. Touch interfaces are incredibly frustrating when the thing you are touching doesn't have enough resistance.
Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
But those quadrants still had options for upgrades. I think people vastly misunderstand that chart. It was about reducing product lines down because the Apple of the 90s had too many models that all varied very subtly.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
I have a limited understanding of local LLMs, but from what I gather 128GB is not enough to match DeepSeek v4 Flash or GPT 6.1 Luna. And these models are so cheap right now. What's the use case besides having your data locally?
These are right at the edge of desirable for me right now -- but it's hard to pull the trigger. I'm imagining an M7 Pro with 480 GB/s and therefore an M7 Max 850-900 GB/s. And significantly better GPU speeds as well. If I knew I could get the M7 Max Q2 of next year, especially at 192GB of RAM, I'd wait.
But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..
Notably these chips came out back in March of this year. Today's changes are in the display and form factor but maintaining the same CPU, GPU, and memory specs.
Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.
At this point it's pretty certain they've skipped M6 Pro/Max or they'd be a flagship feature of today's laptop.
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
Pro tip always get the silver macbooks because they wear out considerably better. On the black ones the paint near the charger ends up looking terrible and any dents/nicks/scratches look bad.
Annoys me to no end that fun colors are limited to the "cheap" lines like the Neo, Air, and Duo while Pros are boring. If I'm spending $4k on a laptop then why can't I get it in green? It genuinely makes no sense.
Champagne/Starlight is definitely the way to go when available. Starlight especially, it's mostly silver but sometimes the light catches it just right to give it this sort of iridescent gradient to a light gold.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
Except there is no "paint". Neither are there any "black ones"; space grey isn't very close to black, and I've seen no wear issues of any kind on any of the Macs I support.
It's interesting that they've decided to release a new high-end model this year even though they aren't coming out with new high-end M6 chips. Apparently they have decided to not make Pro/Max versions of the M6 in favor of accelerating development of the M7 series, which will have improved support for on-device AI. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
Yeah they have done this for awhile now. It is weird to have your cheapest base model option outperform your MUCH more expensive configs on single core perf though.
For work I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen and these were the only times I have wanted to use it:
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
A laptop starting at almost 3 grand with only 24gb ram is a tragedy, the RAMpocalypse is brutal.
Basically $400 premium for a screen upgrade. I'm sure the screen is brilliant but mini LED is very much not bad. It's a real bummer that we seem to be entering an era where each year with tech it leans more towards a new product offering that is more but for more money versus getting more for our dollar consistently.
OLED feels pretty established at this point... could they really not have pulled off just making that the default screen on pro's or is this just a price gouge for a premium feature.
replacing the notch with a hole punch isn't much of an improvement for me anyway. it still kills the top quarter inch of the display for non-letterboxed movies, games etc. I'm tempted to replace my Air with a Neo just to have a non-punctured screen.
The touch screen is such a silly idea here. It even looks ridiculous in their own marketing photos. [1] The keyboard and track pad are already a great combo for getting things done.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
I agree. The ergonomics of using a touch screen on a laptop screen aren't great. It only really works if you convert it to a tablet so that the screen is closer to you and angled up a bit for comfort, but it's no longer a laptop, so why bother?
A macbook with apple pencil support that can be held like a tablet (turn the screen 180 degrees?) would be incredible for digital drawing. Hope to see it in my lifetime.
Back in the day this would have been a “One more thing…” announcement. Apple must be upset with the hardware prices to bury this a late October press release.
Steve had been an outspoken critic of touchscreen laptops. It seems that none of his original gripes are addressed in this release. Another drop in the bucket of half-assed hardware releases from apple "our competitors have it so we need it too" (vision pro, new homepod thing, iphone duo, etc)
If only we could discuss the OLED display rather than an optional feature. I did not see anything in the marketing materials that indicated I would be punished for refusing to utilize the touchscreen.
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
Yeah, if you can turn off or ignore the touch part, there's a whopper of a weight savings, a better display panel, and improved thermal performance hiding in this package.
That's an additional device, additional financing potentially on a different life cycle, potentially a different account to manage.
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
The full spec is significantly more expensive in my local currency (Denmark, DKK) than in USD. Something like $7500 even after sales tax of 25% is added.
are you still on the same macbook? Im using the same config and its running solid, note from above is true on the darker colored version, getting some color changes, but its still a beast of a machine.
Really glad I'm not currently shopping for a new computer.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
When I saw rumours of it being touch I thought it would be a continuation of the iPhone Duo* idea but swapping between MacOS and iPadOS with a detachable keyboard, so if you are detached you have a screen, ipadOS and touch, if you plugin the keyboard it has additional hardware and macOS "swaps in" like some companies have attempted in the past
I've always thought the ideal future is to have the phone just be the desktop when docked, if computing advances well enough, and super disappointed this is just some random touch laptop.
The OLED is great as I use a 32" 4k 240hz OLED on MacOS and it has made a huge difference in my eye strain but I don't understand the point of the touch without a proper use for it.
* that you can use the Duo folded 90deg like a mini laptop.
They have had people asking them for touchscreen laptops for years. They legitimately lose sales to people who want a Mac but refuse to buy a laptop without a touch screen.
I think this is the wrong device to start with, though. The demand for touchscreens is probably highest in the cheapest lines. But presumably this will trickle down over the next few years.
Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.
Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
I’ve felt for years that they were holding out until they could make a dual touchscreen MacBook work and be a peak experience. I was expecting an iPhone duo type MacBook. That hasn’t happened.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
My company once gave me a touchscreen laptop and I did know that until I touched the screen by accident. It was fun to play but I never found it useful. I heard many people saying the same, some of them even preferred to disable. I find it uncomfortable to touch a laptop screen... The only thing seems to benefit from that for me is photo editing apps or 3D modelling.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.
You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.
when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.
It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.
I’m surprised because Apple has famously (and publicly) argued in the past that touchscreens on laptops were a bad idea. Things can change, of course, but I don’t see anything here that even attempts to invalidates any of the arguments they made against touchscreen laptops at the time, which I still think were pretty compelling.
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
> In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
I have not experienced that at all. I see people touch their touch-capable laptop screens all the time.
I don’t understand how people legitimately hold this belief that no one could or would use a laptop touchscreen. This is exactly how millions of people use their tablets every day. You hold it in your lap and you poke the screen. Or you use the stand to prop it up on a table and you poke at the screen. And shockingly, your arm doesn’t fall off.
I really hope the screen no longer has the slow response and ghosting anymore. I'm surprised by the responsive difference every time I use my outdated 2013 MacBook Air's trackpad and immediately feel the difference over my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 daily driver.
For those HDR video editing / color grading specialists, how do these compare to Samsung + LG OLED TVs, Sony HDR Reference Monitors, or else?
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
I wasn't sure how I would feel about my newish MBP M5 Max when they released this, but given the price increase, and the fact that I have zero interest in a better screen since I dock most of the time, I am happy I paid $2K less for the same horsepower earlier this year.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
I am going to jump on the touch hate bandwagon but more specifically I think it’s odd in the format they designed. I think the MSFT surface is brilliant because you can fold it down into an iPad like device which can be great for travel and other non-desk uses.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
> “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.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
Admittedly, Apple has “refused” to do many things over the years (pen support on iPad comes to mind) and yet ends up doing them. Apple refuses to do something until they want to sell it.
FWIW, I don’t understand the appeal of this device at all, but I don’t expect much consistency from Apple.
I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.
Get a custom-made cloth or use a thin microfiber like a lens cleaning cloth and put it between the keyboard and screen. Whenever you close the computer. Keeps the smudges off and prevents key shaped wear marks in your display.
I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
I am on board for touchscreen (and pencil support) for macOS due to my dream of only carrying an iPad Pro for all development; however, I think they’re making the same mistake as the touch bar - touch is only available on the most expensive Mac’s which will ensure they’re niche. Niche options for user input ensure very few apps get updated to use the new user input (foldable phones, I’m speaking about you).
My god they finally did it. After all the fears of canibalizing iPad sales and gorilla arms. An Apple touchscreen MacBook.
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
CPU + battery in the top-cover kills the balance of the laptop and makes the whole thing heavier. It's a really awkward design compared to a clamshell laptop with a very thin display-only lid.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
My god they’re really running out ideas in Cupertino. What I need is a screen that gives an electrical shock to anybody that dares to touch it with their filthy fingers.
If i wanted a touch screen mb air, id get an ipad. i will actively avoid these. apple has been dropping the ball big time lately. ive noticed siri has a 5 second delay on my phone now, making reminder setting not so easy.
2000 nits peak screen brightness with nano texture is going to look incredible outdoors. Not sure I'm feeling the need to upgrade yet but glad the brightness+coating combo will continue to be a thing
> Up to 13 more hours than Intel-based MacBook Pro
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
Hoping for a follow-up convertible touchscreen pen-capable MacBook Air. iPad Pro is just too limiting with iPadOS and it's thicker and heavier than a MacBook Air or any of my convertible Chromebooks.
Seems like this is essentially a 400$ upgrade for the M6 Pro MacBook Pro. Those 400$ get you better sound, a better display and touch.
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
> Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
Years ago like 2010, 11 Microsoft had demo touchscreen computers running an art application in the Kids Room at the MOMA museum in NYC. It was responsive to actual brushes and was quite an interesting interface. As far as I knew it was a beta.
I always thought if Apple did touch on the macbook it would come with a redesign to merge macOS with touch elements from the iPad. As it stands this feels like more of an afterthought.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
I thought that they would basically replace macbooks with ipad pros. Sort of like microsoft surface, a tablet-laptop combo. Not sure what their plan is now.
Not a fan of touchscreen on inclined surfaces, personally. I think the ergonomics of this will be bad for shoulders/elbows.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
Does this mean that macOS will natively support touch screens so I don't need to look anymore for after-market solutions[0] for mine? That would be cool.
I’m not sure. macOS has had some degree of support for touch screens internally for a very long time (2010) but required hardware specific drivers.
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
Same, my latency in the home (which is where I spend 99% of my time), even over WiFi, is generally <5ms, which is plenty low enough to stream the desktop to the laptop via Sunshine+Moonlight and even control fast-paced FPS games.
OLED displays now are tandem OLED displays which stack multiple layers. This means you don't need to exponentially crank up the voltage to provide more brightness which also increases lengivity of the panel (and increases battery life).
I have a, what, 2019 LG CX OLED TV. 55". Used in anger as computer monitor since new. With complete disregard for burnout. It's… perfectly fine? I can't see any dimming or patterns or faults at all.
Some of my students use touchscreen Windows laptops. They seem to be OK with them but I never found them usable particularly for coding. A touchscreen laptop has ergonomically bad design. Or it could just be a generational thing.
Aside: Does anyone else find the new AI texture explosions Apple's using on their marketing pages now a little unsettling and un-Apple? I guess I'm desperate for at least one tech brand to feel / remain human.
I see. The iPad and Macbook are converging. Interesting. I can’t say I get the use case but perhaps it will fold in some interesting way that makes it usable. I have no problem using a touchscreen occasionally but in the standard configuration the screen will wobble if you touch it.
Apple's been trying (in vain?) to sell iPad users a Magic Keyboard for six years and add a windowing system to iPadOS to pretend it's a real operating system, so I suppose they're trying to bridge the gap from the opposite (Macbook) side.
Everybody worried about the usefulness of touch (which I do find occasionally useful), meanwhile they've literally set base pricing at $2900. For a 14 inch mbp, with 24GB. Hilarious.
It might not be the right machine for you and that's ok.
If I needed one of these for my work (I don't) and was going to be using it every day for the next two years, I think I could justify it. It would be about $4 / day which is within reach. Add in the fact that Mac's have decent resale value and the daily expense could be quite a bit less.
AWw dammit I was waiting for a body refresh with M6, but this is still M5…
Why are Apple's new product lines so..self-defeating now? I wanted to get the iPhone Duo but it has worse cameras than my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and now this Mac..
Looks like a skipped year for people who want the best of everything
I've noticed this with a lot of products lately. It seems rare for a new release to strictly supersede or maintain performance on all attributes on a successor.
Funny how half the press release tries to hide the notch/island/whatever its called. I almost thought they gave up on that, then I finally saw it like 7 or 8 images in.
No cellular which is literally the only thing missing from the macbook pro :(
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best
2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
What’s your use case for cellular on a laptop? At least here in Canada data plans are expensive enough that I could blow through my monthly limit in 30min with a laptop. I would be quite annoyed if my wifi dropped and I had discovered only later that I’d exhausted my data unknowingly
My first iPad entirely felt like a waste of money. Any time I'd want to do something useful with it, the mac was a better choice. Not sure what cellular on the iPad would have ever offered me, but I know why I want it on my laptop.
Got the m5 pro like last month. Actually no FOMO this time. I wonder how the AMOLED looks irl, I bet it's sweet but the current pro motion is already top notch.
Doesn't look like it folds back or does tent mode. Those are some good use cases for touchscreen PCs, being able to walk around in tablet mode in something like a warehouse, for example.
The fancy OLED display would actually be a potential reason to finally upgrade from my M1 Pro but even if I could afford it, I find prices like that hard to swallow (and I couldn't care less about touch in a laptop fwiw). Guess I'll buy one used in a year or three, maybe.
Cue the folks who have used nothing but Apple laptops for the past 20 years coming here and wondering who would possibly want a laptop with a touch screen.
I think the confusion is lot of Apple enthusiasts drank the kool-aid the company served them saying touch screen is "yuck". And now they have a touch screen, it takes a while to re-orient themselves.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
So unbelievably disappointing, right after the disappointment of the Duo. I was in the market for both, the early reviews of the Duo stopped me from upgrading, and the landing page of this new Mac has stopped me from upgrading that.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
Apple said its skipping M6 for Macbook Pro -- there is no m6 pro/max -- so the next chip MBP will get is m7 in 2027. So I would hold off on buying one until next year. This is essentially a 2025 product refresh.
I am pretty sure Steve is rolling in his grave. It's pretty saddening to see Apple losing its vision, what is making MacBook Pro different than other laptops in the market? Apple silicon? Not anymore.
MacOS? Probably, but it's getting worse too.
I have had touch screen laptop (Dell Inspiron), and boy, it was such a horrible and useless feature. Screen is always greasier than gas-station hot dog.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure their stock is headed for a new ATH.
looks like they brought back the glowing apple logo on the lid for the first time in a decade!
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
This is disappointing, I was hoping they were going to do something interesting with the display hinge to make it make sense as a touch interface. Can’t see it being useful as is.
Please tell me the rounded corners at the bottom of the screen are just for the effect and they aren't actually physically like that. This would be worse than the current notch, you can even see them clipping the text in the LM Studio picture.
Touch screen on a laptop is objectively disgusting. I have a Lenovo yoga X1 or something with a touch screen (and it folds backwards into a tablet) hence the name. It is stupid and useless. I can imagine Steve Jobs turning in his grave right now.
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
Touch screens are dead, no one ever said good things about them. Also, I think the best setup now (regardless macos or linux) is having your heavy lifting compute at home and you use something like macbook air and ssh into it, that way you get the best portability and also you are secure if your laptop is lost.
If the screen were detachable and you get a giant 16'' ipad, I would consider it. I do not want touch interface on a laptop and will never buy this. I do want non-touch OLED screen though.
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
The product itself is fine, I have no strong opinions on it. But what a hell of a disappointing unveiling.
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
Makes sense this event is in LA- this this is designed to be a mobile media creation device. Most users don't care about most of the features that are highlighted in the press release, but someone creating any sort of visual media would.
Everyone's focused on the touchscreen, but I'm seriously impressed how they managed to cut down the weight.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Nice, but they're merely fixing a regression ;) Now if they could do the same with the iPhone instead of introducing more Bricky McBrick editions…
2019, 13" MacBook only weighed 3.02 lbs
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111945
13" != 14"
How big was the battery?
Definitely appreciated. The increased weight is the one downside of my M1 laptop over my earlier 2015 Macbook.
Sounds like maybe the Macbook Air could become the original 12 inch Macbook(2015) weight eventually. They might even re-introduce a 12 inch model. Imagine that!
The best thing about OLED is not having disgusting amounts of blooming[0] and purple-pink edge fraying.
It's so bad that the first time I used my M series I thought I needed to RMA it because the display must be broken it it looks this bad, right? Nope.
[0]https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m0zq6aEnGWs/sddefault.jpg
Thats a side effect of the 1000+ dimming zones no? I snagged this ASUS ProArt display that was Professional Grade on eBay and among its many flaws is that its 1000+ dimming zones result in blooming whenever you have bright items on top of a complete black background. Makes it terrible for horror movies. :/
They might have changed the internal fan layout. If you look it AR mode, you can look underneath the display , there’s usually two fan exhausts there, this one has only one
But I also only have an m1 16” so it may not be a brand new change
13-inch M1 MacBook Air: 2.8 pounds (1.29 kg)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111883
13-inch M5 MacBook Air: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126320
Macbook airs are lighter because they are smaller and lack fans (and maybe for other reasons too) so it is not comparable, but it is one of the reasons I like fanless laptops (whatever cuts a bit the weight for mobility is welcome).
To put in a perspective it’s the weight of a new iPhone duo.
That's crazy.
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Back to similar weight as the 2016 Touch Bar era MBPs (13" 1.37 kg; 15" 1.83 kg), except way better thermals and battery life.
TBH this is one of the things that will be a clear downgrade imo. Weight reductions are thinness are not free. The Pro and Max chip version are already over powered for the cooling system the current macbook pros have. And now they are further cutting into the laptop...
Not sure why this is downvoted but it is a valid concern. I will wait and see some thermal testing as someone mentioned on new cooling design which I can't find on the page just yet.
The display change itself likely accounts for some of the thickness and weight reduction. The mini-LED backlight grid on the previous displays wasn't nearly as thin or light as an OLED panel.
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It looks like it went from a 100 Wh battery to 72.6 Wh battery. That will definitely reduce the weight.
Edit: I was incorrect, I thought I had clicked the 16" spec page but had not. The 16" MacBook is still at 100 Wh.
The 16" still lists 100Wh:
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/specs/
The 14" went from 72.4Wh to 72.6Wh.
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ahh that's no bueno...
is the touch part of the display toggle-able? i don't mind a better display but i have no, not a single desire ever to touch it.
Welcome to 2016. Lightweight OLED displays have been in the market since a decade ago, but now we are praising Apple for catching up 10 years later for a laptop with a "pro" moniker? Damn, the Apple ass-kissing here never disappoints.
This comes as straight out of PC vs Mac commercials. You confuse technology with actual products.
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Have you ever used a Mac? It is by and far the best laptop on average, and it keeps getting better.
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Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops? I've never really been drawn to wanting to do that. My mouse is far more accurate and doesn't block my view. But maybe it's just because I don't have it and I would find tons of uses for it. Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen. I guess I can understand for testing iOS/iPad apps but past that I just don't see myself wanting to use that.
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
I can’t be the only one who recoils in horror at the thought of TOUCHING THE SCREEN! It’s like going to the toilet and not washing your hands after. I’m sure people do it, but..ew.
Now think of all those people ordering on touch screens in MacDonalds and then eating their food with their hands. Yuk! :-&
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Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
This is how my 8-year-old works on her school Chromebook. And all of the kids at her school that I've seen using laptops are similar. Touch the screen to interact, type on the keyboard. I think they're just wired to believe every screen should be touchable and go with whatever is easiest for them in the moment.
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Yes unless you've seen nontech people use a touchscreen you won't get the appeal.
Some people don't intuitively use trackpads so they'll use a mouse and if they discover touchscreens that becomes a feature that needs to come with any laptop after that.
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I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a couple of years ago for my linux laptop and had been using it for months before I realized when I was wiping a smudge off of the monitor that it was a touch display! It was quite the surprise. I have yet to find it of any value.
Ha, exactly the same here! It's really annoying if you want to wipe away some dust and the computer/phone reacts to that.
In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
Particularly at the end of a workday. Reaching up would be a pain.
I'm not the target for this particular product either and you and I use our MBPs in pretty much identical ways. I will say though, if the laptop's hinge allowed reverse clamshell like the Yoga, then I would consider the premium for a feature I would rarely use. I like the idea of a tablet, but any time I'm seated with one, I'm either doing something I'd do on my phone or doing something that I'd rather be doing on my computer running a desktop OS.
Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!
The set of people who use convertible laptops in tablet mode seems tiny. It’s one of those things that looks like a great idea but doesn’t pan out in real life. Everyone uses it once, says “cool” and never uses it again. 13” tablet that weighs as much as a laptop is not a great form factor.
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The Thinkpad I got years ago accidentally came with a touchscreen (I looked for other specs and totally missed that part). I've never used it.
Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
My work laptop has a touchscreen. I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.
It's expectation. Think of all the screens in your life that you interact with and when you can't touch them it feels broken (at least to me). So I don't use my laptop as a tablet but when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button. Or I'm helping someone with a task and reaching to move a window directly is natural.
So it is just table stakes at this point.
> when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button
I have never had this. I don't think this is the expectation among people using laptops either? Pressing escape is much faster, doesn't obscure the screen, and doesn't require me to aim.
For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.
Pen support sounds 10x more useful than touch, particularly when they already have a pen for the iPad.
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Windows benefits from a touchscreen more often on something like a diagram where you'll be panning around up/down/left/right, zooming, etc because the trackpad situation isn't very good.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
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To be honest, I'm more often than not more concerned about not having smudges on my laptop's screen.
I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
If you want your kids to touch a lot.
As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
> As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
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> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops
My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.
> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.
Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.
So this device would not be for me either.
I have a surface pro 4 and absolutely like touch. The combination of an actual keyboard and touch is very efficient.
I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.
I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.
I actually disable touch screen in bios on my Dell XPS13 because I don't like touching it accidentally but then I'm not the target market for a touchscreen laptop.
I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.
I use it constantly. No one actually holds their hands up to the screen for extended periods of time. But touching the screen to click a button can be more efficient than tabbing or mousing to it. Especially if the laptop is on your lap.
Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.
It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
Maybe this is the reason they doing it now
the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing
I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts
I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.
Sometimes tapping a button is easier or faster than grabbing my mouse and navigating over to it but it is pretty infrequent.
The only reason I would want touch is if the screen would fold and rotate in order to turn it into a tablet. If Apple made this in a 12-inch format (like their old 12-inch MacBook I'd buy it immediately.
No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!
> No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare.
I have no idea how this keeps getting repeated. No one with a touchscreen laptop is just hovering their arms in front of the screen like a zombie for hours.
It’s another input. You use it when it makes sense. For some, that’s pretty frequent. For others like you, maybe never.
HP has a lot of hybrid laptop tablets and they make the hinges fail much more often.
Only the Surface line, as in where the tablet is the main form with an optional keyboard makes sense here.
It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...
It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
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I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.
I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.
I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.
I have a touchscreen ThinkPad. As an instructor, I found it useful to draw on slides with the pen. I rarely touch it otherwise.
I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.
I use the touch screen on my Panasonic Toughbook: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...
I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.
I don’t have a dedicated tablet, and use a touchscreen laptop that’s “folded back” in lieu of that. It’s not as good but cheaper than two devices. To me it’s inherently a budget tool. An €3300 touchscreen laptop doesn’t really compute.
I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.
Only use case I can think of is using the iPhone simulator right from the Mac’s screen instead of having to send to iPhone
I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)
> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops?
Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.
Something wrong with your computer. My 11 year old XPS13 with touch screen has worked fine in Linux ever since I got it. And same with my Surface Pro 2 running Ubuntu.
I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.
I like some of the 2-in-1 devices that come with a pen - Surface Pro type devices or ones with a 360 degree hinge.
But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.
Always have and always will love having a touchscreen on a laptop.
At this point it's a huge loss to not have it on a display. Don't like it? Then shut up and don't use it. Don't yuck others' yum.
It's great for convertibles, but less useful for regular laptops. One great use case is mobile app development, though.
I hate it. It's beyond me why people would intentionally smudge their laptop display.
I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).
Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.
Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...
I want to argue that there’s been 15 years of UI experimentation since then. Occasional use is okay, but should be absolutely optional. As long as we don’t all get scammed to use touch as the primary UI like we did in cars.
The screen is too far away and when you touch it it moves back a little ruining your sensitivity and wiggling your touch point.
If you lock the screen position with hardware it just lifts the keyboard when you touch just a little too hard.
You need stability for touch and a superlight laptop just does not have that.
My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.
My wife is also a teacher and also loves the touch screen on her notebook, she will instinctively touch to scroll whenever she's on my macbook.
I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.
It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.
I always look for a way to disable it
Why? I'm genuinely curious. Couldn't you simply not touch the screen? It's what you're supposed to do for all non-touchscreen laptops anyway.
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These comments are LLM-tier now, if not LLM-generated already.
"""
Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?
I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.
Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.
But that's just me, I'm a simple guy. Like and subscribe!
"""
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I have a Macbook Pro 14 first gen and I love this machine but watching what Apple is doing lately I think they are starting to loose the plot.
A foldable iPhone, macbooks with touch displays, apple watches constantly listening to your conversations, dropping updates for not so old devices like AWU 1, I understand that I am not a target audience for those products but to me this just speaks a lack of vision for the company and their products. I mean this is one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the best people working there and this is the best that we can get a foldable iphone and a touch display I don't believe it.
The last keynote also was probably the worst one I ever saw couple of years ago I couldn't wait for keynotes this year I am totally over them we are at the Tron meme scene where one the board member asked what was new in the new OS version and seems to be just the number - [0]
[0] - Hacking Encom's new operating system – TRON: Legacy (2010) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeh3E67brBs&t=115s
Exactly what i was thinking, with these decision they are making a quick bucks but in the long term apple will just be another washed and forgetful brand like most of the windows brand, and then what reason to get a macbook ?
They worked so hard to "think different", get a following with people that would willingly spend more for a product inferior technically because it was just bold.
i am the first one to appreciate the direction apple is taking, as a customer it will bring even more competition to the windows laptop market because everything will be similar, but when i put my self in steve jobs shoe, i want to puke.
Fully willing to accept that I could be an outlier, but I have never understood how a market exists for laptops with touch screens.
I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
It would be interesting to know what ThinkPad model it was. The older ones had pretty small trackpads so they were difficult to reach.
On Macbooks the trackpad is so large that you can reach it even from the sides of the laptop and the two finger scrolling actually works without second thought.
You got me curious, which GUIs with little keyboard-control support are you using / forced to use?
I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.
Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.
I agree with you. When I show things to my kids on my laptop, they instantly try to play with the content by touching the screen.
While true, I do not believe kids are the intended market for a laptop in which the entry model starts near $3k USD.
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...Chromebooks are touch screen? This whole time, I've used them assuming they aren't.
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I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.
The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.
Much like the Touch Bar, I expect that Apple will learn this lesson the hard way.
You are an outliner. Touch is standard across every device. To not have it just feels like a deduction.
Even now, I find myself resisting the urge to tap things on my Macbook display as it is.
The world moved on. Touch is standard, and Steve Jobs was incredibly wrong with his weird opinions.
This is like people arguing that a computer mouse is not necessary in 1990.
You’re not an outlier.
I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)
I mean it's only $400 more than the LED non-touch screen.
Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.
I much prefer using an actual device, which is required for a lot of other hardware features anyway.
5 trillion market cap. That's how much of an outlier (i.e. clueless) you are.
Whatever-trillion market cap was wrong about the Touch Bar
Oh wow, it’s like they’re trying less and less.
When they introduced the Apple Pencil and people were like “haha it’s a stylus”, the thing was decidedly NOT a stylus (it actually couldn’t be used to control some parts of the UI). It was an actual digital pen, something that used to be specialized and expensive external hardware, and it worked beautifully with the iPad. It was literally “stylus but GOOD”. I saw it and thought “people will make memes about this, but Apple totally gets it”.
When they introduced the Vision Pro, VR was just kind of shit. Bulky, ugly, uncool. Vision Pro tried to resolve some of the issues, but it was still kind of half-assed. Like they wanted to have a VR device but couldn’t actually make it work. Good resolution, but not great. Vergence-accomodation conflict not addressed. Still bulky and ugly. Isolation kind of addressed (with the AR-ish UX and the “see-through” display), but not enough.
Now we got the foldable iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook.
Foldable phones are still awfully delicate and the whole concept doesn’t have a clear “killer” use case. There’s no new UX, no new features, it’s just an iPad Mini in a marginally smaller device that’s expensive as hell. Apple didn’t even try to address the obvious shortcomings, they just built the same stupid thing everyone else is failing to sell.
Touchscreen laptops still wobble, they still get covered with fingerprints, they’re still uncomfortable and there’s still no meaningful UX. This thing doesn’t even try to address any of that. Their marketing images literally just show hands hovering above the keyboard and touching the screen for no good reason. They’ve been mocking touchscreen laptops for years now and now they release one like it’s the most obvious thing ever. 1984 vibes.
The Duo does have a killer use case at least for me: multitasking
Game + Video Messaging + Browsing App + Development Notes + Research etc
Their demo example for the touch interface is piano keys? That's a 2010 Scott Forstall level of skeuomorphism that doesn't translate well for a laptop screen because it's not convenient.
The hands are also almost in the exact same image Steve Jobs had on a slide during the iPad keynote showing touch on a laptop is not ergonomic. It's poetic, almost.
Soon, if they attach an alternator to Steve’s coffin, they’ll be able to run the Apple campus off it.
"We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work," Jobs said at the company's "Back to the Mac" event in 2010. "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," Jobs continued. "It doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible."
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/apple-intelligence/articles/ergono...
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Their demo is also mobile app development using touchscreen for testing apps in the simulator.
Testing touchscreen experiences for other devices is the main thing I can imagine actually using this for.
Pretty useless, it's easy to simulate touches and gestures already.
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Yeah, piano playing was a bad example. There’s a reason MIDI keyboard manufacturers try so hard to replicate the weighted feel of a real piano. Your fingers need feedback.
An interesting aside here, there is no one, true style of action for keyboard instruments and no one, true type of feedback.
I have a good 88-note hammer action stage piano. I love it for acoustic pianos and it's OK for electric pianos (Rhodes, Wurlitzer) but it sucks a bit for organ, clavinet and synths.
I've seen people play Hammond really, really well on a weighted keybeds but it's much easier to just plug a second cheap(er) synth action controller in for organ parts.
I've never met anyone that really liked playing a tablet screen though. :P
As a longtime laptop musician, using the QWERTY keyboard to play notes in the absence of a MIDI controller is infinitely preferable to this goofy demo.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
Reminds me of that stupid DJ demo of the touch bar. Did any DJ actually use that in practice? Well if they do they better hold on to their now vintage MacBook.
I agree that a piano demo seems like a bad idea. But damn if I don’t daily long for the iOS 6 days where buttons and tappable areas were well defined and there were some fun and whimsy to the interface. As compared to the flat unintuitive desolate landscape of recent years. I would rather have a big animated cassette deck in my music player than the current overly polished full page advert I get every time I open the app. At least Forstall and his team cared enough.
Reminiscent of the DJ who performed a DJ set on the TouchBar...
Yes it is. I mean, you’re not going to play Chopin on it, obviously. But for selecting notes into a DAW? Hella convenient.
Repliers: stop pretending you make music. You don’t and it shows. Producers are going to love this.
Yeah that's a much better use case. Now you mention it I could see it being useful for soft synths, mixing, effects, etc.
How is it convenient? A pro workflow is not holding your arm with the finger up in the air trying to avoid accidental taps, when you can get a small 25 key akai midi controller for a 100 usd. And it's easy to carry around and comes with velocity-sensitive keys and pressure-sensitive pads.
we have computer keyboard playing mode in nearly every DAW under the sun. It's useless
What's the point of a touch display if the laptop doesn't have a 360 hinge !? The interaction looks very awkward and unless they stiffen the hinge compared to previous model, the thin screen will keep tilting backwards.
"Touch screens don't want to be vertical" "After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off" "ergonomically terrible"
- Steve Jobs
Apple: check our new vertical touchscreen!
Jobs was wrong about a lot of things. Just because he thought an idea was silly, doesn't automatically make so.
Jobs died 15 years ago, and since then, Apple has been successfully selling iPads in vertical/laptop like configuration for nearly a decade.
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I wish I hadn't read this comment, because now I really feel like a 360 hinge is sorely lacking.
My wife sits on the couch, "indian style", with a laptop in her lap angled at about a 45 degree. She holds the edges of it with her arms, and brings the keyboard up to her stomach kinda...
Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly
Macbook hinges always get loose with time too
There's no universe this doesn't negatively affect the UX of the OS for non-touch users. You can't simply support (or rather you can half-arse) new affordances without contorting the rest of the already well worn paths.
How do you think webapps work today? Is macOS UX actually well thought out to begin with? (no)
It's a nonissue when you look at the state of macOS attention to detail nowadays, regardless of which side of the fence you're on.
>Is macOS UX actually well thought out to begin with?
To begin with, yes. The decline only started around ten years ago.
I can actually see a possibility where this improves UI/UX a bit. One being the removal of some many hover-over UI elements, e.g., the (x) button on notifications do not display unless a mouse is hovering over the notification badge.
So, it may makes things a little easier for some GUI scripting. I can also see the UX improving for some disabilities, but I know that is merely coincidental rather than intentional.
Windows did this seemingly by not caring that it's also a touch screen, so not everything in the system is touch-friendly. It's still fine for many situations.
But they have already done it. The updates are already in macOS and they have not negatively affected the UX.
Density is way down on UI elements for one. OS X used to feel like a Workstation. With every release macOS feels closer to a toy. Touch is great for convenience, but not getting into the weeds with “real” work.
Er… Yes they have. Liquid Glass is awful. It’s not only ugly (that’s preference, though), it has definitely negatively affected the UX. That’s why they’re adding sliders and options and reversal left and right.
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Those changes are already in the latest macOS. So feel free to share your opinion on what we’ve already been using instead of speculating.
I'm still on Sequoia for this reason. I want a UI optimized for displaying text content and mouse and keyboard control. Mostly keyboard. I definitely don't want the larger border radius on the windows that would seem to be designed for touch.
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Isn't that his point though ? Their plan seems to half-ass touch support (i.e. the menu bar, minimize/close buttons, etc. all stay in their current size), so it seems like a waste of hardware to include a touch screen just for very little functionality. If instead they make the UI friendly to fat fingers, they'd very much affect the mouse/trackpad experience.
Most Windows laptops have had touch for a very long time now.
Does that mean you also believe the same to be true for mouse affordances ruining it for keyboard users and vice-versa? Or "touch" is special in this regard?
I can't think of cases where mouse affordances necessarily, intrinsically make things worse for keyboard users.
Of course, there's the extremely common case of keyboard support being half-assed or missing from GUI apps. But that's not mouse affordances making things worse, that's developers just not having the time or inclination to have great keyboard support.
Whereas, touch affordances seem like they'll be a lot more disruptive.
Mouse affordances don't usually ruin it for keyboard preferrers. Keyboard shortcuts and control are often an afterthought or downright written off because "they can just click" but thats down to laziness or lack of care than some hard and fast rule. However, a keyboard affordance is usually invisible, and a mouse affordance isn't, so they can very happily co-exist without affecting one another. For instance, the Alt modifiers in menus in classic Windows, those have almost no effect at all on anyones ability to click the menu item with a mouse.
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
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Just look at Windows 8?
Touch is probably not going to be useful in most contexts, but there are two things that come to mind:
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
Not letting the screen bend back all the way neuters every avantage of touch. Touch interfaces are incredibly frustrating when the thing you are touching doesn't have enough resistance.
That's a good point, the use case for mobile app dev would be quite appealing even if a little niche.
I don’t understand Apple’s market positioning here.
Apple has always positioned the Pro as having the best display in a laptop. Now that’s no longer true.
Are we really moving to 3 tier of laptop displays: Air, Pro, and Pro with ProLED XDR?
That seems unnecessarily confusing for consumers.
“Pro” used to mean you were getting Apple’s best hardware, designed for "professionals".
Now “Pro” doesn't mean that anymore.
Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
Your assertion hasn’t been true for a while.
You have the MacBook Pro with three tiers of SoCs, each with binning options.
There was already an option for screen coatings and now an option for a new screen type.
That’s not to mention storage and RAM choices.
Its still the MacBook with HDR display and active cooling and more inputs. I’m not sure why options are an issue
It's been a while since Jobs' nice simple quad chart. I miss the elegance of that.
But those quadrants still had options for upgrades. I think people vastly misunderstand that chart. It was about reducing product lines down because the Apple of the 90s had too many models that all varied very subtly.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
Where are they lacking?
Explain further what you mean. The displays are still best in class. What metrics do you have suggesting otherwise?
For local LLM people:
(for comparison, M4 pro has 273 GB/s and M1 pro has 200GB/s and M1 max has 400GB/s)
M5 Pro (20-core GPU): 307 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 24 GB, 48 GB, 64 GB).
M5 Max (32-core GPU): 460 GB/s memory bandwidth. (36 GB)
M5 Max (40-core GPU): 614 GB/s memory bandwidth (supports 48 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB)
IMO getting a studio for LLMs is a wiser choice since it doesn't heat up and there are no batteries to degrade.
For an M5 max top bin with 128GB Ram:
- mac studio: $5,899.00 (with 2TB ssd bump to match the default macbook sku)
- macbook 16: $7,399.00
Portability gets a hit but I feel you can have a thin client and let the studio do the heavy lifting back at your home/studio(heh).
I have a limited understanding of local LLMs, but from what I gather 128GB is not enough to match DeepSeek v4 Flash or GPT 6.1 Luna. And these models are so cheap right now. What's the use case besides having your data locally?
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I was on the market for a 128Gb M5 Max and went with the Studio + an Air for about the same money
These are right at the edge of desirable for me right now -- but it's hard to pull the trigger. I'm imagining an M7 Pro with 480 GB/s and therefore an M7 Max 850-900 GB/s. And significantly better GPU speeds as well. If I knew I could get the M7 Max Q2 of next year, especially at 192GB of RAM, I'd wait.
But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..
Notably these chips came out back in March of this year. Today's changes are in the display and form factor but maintaining the same CPU, GPU, and memory specs.
Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.
What's are the odds that the M7 Max goes above 128GB? (Presuming the rumors about Apple skipping the M6 Pro/Max are true)
At this point it's pretty certain they've skipped M6 Pro/Max or they'd be a flagship feature of today's laptop.
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
Pro tip always get the silver macbooks because they wear out considerably better. On the black ones the paint near the charger ends up looking terrible and any dents/nicks/scratches look bad.
I like scratches on my machines, it gives them character.
Yeah the “brassing” is really cool
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I wish there was a red or green one. Sick of only having two options.
Annoys me to no end that fun colors are limited to the "cheap" lines like the Neo, Air, and Duo while Pros are boring. If I'm spending $4k on a laptop then why can't I get it in green? It genuinely makes no sense.
Life is too short
the champagne color for airs looks really nice when worn too, but i mirror your sentiments on black - it does not age well
Champagne/Starlight is definitely the way to go when available. Starlight especially, it's mostly silver but sometimes the light catches it just right to give it this sort of iridescent gradient to a light gold.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
Except there is no "paint". Neither are there any "black ones"; space grey isn't very close to black, and I've seen no wear issues of any kind on any of the Macs I support.
It's interesting that they've decided to release a new high-end model this year even though they aren't coming out with new high-end M6 chips. Apparently they have decided to not make Pro/Max versions of the M6 in favor of accelerating development of the M7 series, which will have improved support for on-device AI. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
Yeah they have done this for awhile now. It is weird to have your cheapest base model option outperform your MUCH more expensive configs on single core perf though.
The Macbook Pro with M5 Pro/Max came out in March, while the Macbook Pro with M6 came out yesterday.
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They’ve done it before: first retina model has the same cpu and GPU as the previous gen
For work I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen and these were the only times I have wanted to use it:
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
A laptop starting at almost 3 grand with only 24gb ram is a tragedy, the RAMpocalypse is brutal.
Basically $400 premium for a screen upgrade. I'm sure the screen is brilliant but mini LED is very much not bad. It's a real bummer that we seem to be entering an era where each year with tech it leans more towards a new product offering that is more but for more money versus getting more for our dollar consistently.
OLED feels pretty established at this point... could they really not have pulled off just making that the default screen on pro's or is this just a price gouge for a premium feature.
1. Improved thermal system
2. Even better speakers
3. Thinner and lighter while retaining the 100 Wh battery
4. No more notch
Seems like a solid all-around update to be. Other than cellular, I can't possibly imagine what more people could want.
replacing the notch with a hole punch isn't much of an improvement for me anyway. it still kills the top quarter inch of the display for non-letterboxed movies, games etc. I'm tempted to replace my Air with a Neo just to have a non-punctured screen.
Mac displays are 16:10, you're getting letterboxing for movies no matter what you do, with or without a notch or hole punch.
I had to double check when I saw the "piano keyboard" demo picture. I assumed I was on a parody website. How the mighty have fallen ...
The touch screen is such a silly idea here. It even looks ridiculous in their own marketing photos. [1] The keyboard and track pad are already a great combo for getting things done.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
[1] https://mastodon.social/@allenu/117519656286195439
Here's the official launch video, where it looks silly to me, but I know very casual users who love their touchscreen laptops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZI5uUSdEo
Casual users should not be buying the most expensive MacBook Pro unless they have so much money that $3000 (or more) means little to them.
I could see it with tablet but reaching out to touch my laptop, or worse desktop, screen would get very tiring, very quickly.
I agree. The ergonomics of using a touch screen on a laptop screen aren't great. It only really works if you convert it to a tablet so that the screen is closer to you and angled up a bit for comfort, but it's no longer a laptop, so why bother?
I mean it seems like a good idea to me for mobile app development, being able to touchscreen the simulator.
Is it really that useful if you need to test on real hardware anyway?
That seems like a great use case for it.
How many Macbook Pro owners are mobile app developers though?
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Simulation is already great, and one can (and should) test their app on device.
A macbook with apple pencil support that can be held like a tablet (turn the screen 180 degrees?) would be incredible for digital drawing. Hope to see it in my lifetime.
Back in the day this would have been a “One more thing…” announcement. Apple must be upset with the hardware prices to bury this a late October press release.
Steve had been an outspoken critic of touchscreen laptops. It seems that none of his original gripes are addressed in this release. Another drop in the bucket of half-assed hardware releases from apple "our competitors have it so we need it too" (vision pro, new homepod thing, iphone duo, etc)
I also assumed Apple had something up their sleeves that would make sense to everyone once shown.
Meanwhile they just added a touchscreen. No new hinge. No new UI. Not even a Pen support.
WTF are they doing?
> WTF are they doing?
Presumably adding a feature that doesn't cost them very much or otherwise negatively affect the product, but which some users might like.
As an iOS engineer I am actually pretty excited about how this will improve manual testing on simulator.
If only we could discuss the OLED display rather than an optional feature. I did not see anything in the marketing materials that indicated I would be punished for refusing to utilize the touchscreen.
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
Yeah, if you can turn off or ignore the touch part, there's a whopper of a weight savings, a better display panel, and improved thermal performance hiding in this package.
If the main reason to use macOS is that it's required to develop iPhone apps, a touch screen helps with testing them.
Would it not be just easier to connect actual iphone to the laptop for testing?
Not for fast user interaction tests.
I have a Linux laptop with touchscreen, and my main use is to test the touch interactions on web apps, sometimes Android apps.
Sure it's possible to open it on the phone, but that's an extra step usually not justified.
That's an additional device, additional financing potentially on a different life cycle, potentially a different account to manage.
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
I don't own an iphone
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The full spec is significantly more expensive in my local currency (Denmark, DKK) than in USD. Something like $7500 even after sales tax of 25% is added.
What gives?
$3400 for the base model 16”, 24GB/1TB. $2900 for the 14”. Quite steep.
$4950 for Max, Nano Texture 36GB/2TB - This is getting ridiculous.
Seriously. I paid 3400 for my M3 Max 128GB macbook in 2023. Sad times.
> I paid 3400 for my M3 Max 128GB macbook in 2023
A 16" M3 Max with 128GB of RAM and no other upgrades would have been $5000 at launch.
They started shipping at the end of 2023, so you couldn't have bought a refurb.
Either you're remembering the price wrong or you got a crazy deal.
are you still on the same macbook? Im using the same config and its running solid, note from above is true on the darker colored version, getting some color changes, but its still a beast of a machine.
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Here they offer no finance for over £5k. Crap.
Really glad I'm not currently shopping for a new computer.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
When I saw rumours of it being touch I thought it would be a continuation of the iPhone Duo* idea but swapping between MacOS and iPadOS with a detachable keyboard, so if you are detached you have a screen, ipadOS and touch, if you plugin the keyboard it has additional hardware and macOS "swaps in" like some companies have attempted in the past
I've always thought the ideal future is to have the phone just be the desktop when docked, if computing advances well enough, and super disappointed this is just some random touch laptop.
The OLED is great as I use a 32" 4k 240hz OLED on MacOS and it has made a huge difference in my eye strain but I don't understand the point of the touch without a proper use for it.
* that you can use the Duo folded 90deg like a mini laptop.
I wish I could buy this without touch just for the rush of nostalgia, having the illuminated Apple logo on the back
One MacBook Air with a glowing Apple logo on the lid, please!
The glowing logo is back. It's all I ever wanted.
YES
Apple perfected the trackpad to the point where a touchscreen never felt necessary; and that’s how they got away with not building one.
This feels more like a marketing gimmick, anyone remember the Touch Bar?
They have had people asking them for touchscreen laptops for years. They legitimately lose sales to people who want a Mac but refuse to buy a laptop without a touch screen.
I think this is the wrong device to start with, though. The demand for touchscreens is probably highest in the cheapest lines. But presumably this will trickle down over the next few years.
Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.
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Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
I’ve felt for years that they were holding out until they could make a dual touchscreen MacBook work and be a peak experience. I was expecting an iPhone duo type MacBook. That hasn’t happened.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
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My company once gave me a touchscreen laptop and I did know that until I touched the screen by accident. It was fun to play but I never found it useful. I heard many people saying the same, some of them even preferred to disable. I find it uncomfortable to touch a laptop screen... The only thing seems to benefit from that for me is photo editing apps or 3D modelling.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
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I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
I remember Steve Jobs saying something about how silly it would be.
He said the same of the stylus during the iPhone launch, but it eventually came to life (just in a much more specific setting/use case)
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I use Mac mostly, but I also use a Panasonic Toughbook (https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...) and it has a touch screen display and I find it's a useful addition to how I interact with it.
1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.
You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.
> the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag
How so? I have an M2, carry it in a bag daily but my screen is still pristine
especially with the same lid angle. Look at the pictures, they didn't even know how people use touchscreen on the laptops, it's funny
If you've ever watched a kid try to use a MacBook, they instinctively touch the screen because they were raised on iPads.
Even when developing a mobile app and using the simulator, you never wished you could touchscreen the simulator?
I need a screen which zaps me whenever I touch it, to discouraged me from accidentally leaving fingerprints at the edge.
Yes, I agree, but I caught myself touching the screen twice this week forgetting it was a Mac...
when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.
Nope. Never had any desire for one.
OLED screens often exhibit poor text rendering.
I'm curious to see this in person. Looks like the "PROLED" is not using an RGB stripe layout.
Pixel density can reduce text fringing, but I have not seen a laptop OLED panel that renders text as well as an LCD yet.
It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.
This looks the same as the iPad Pro tandem OLED pixel layout. That I happen to write this comment on.
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I’m surprised because Apple has famously (and publicly) argued in the past that touchscreens on laptops were a bad idea. Things can change, of course, but I don’t see anything here that even attempts to invalidates any of the arguments they made against touchscreen laptops at the time, which I still think were pretty compelling.
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
> In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
I have not experienced that at all. I see people touch their touch-capable laptop screens all the time.
I don’t understand how people legitimately hold this belief that no one could or would use a laptop touchscreen. This is exactly how millions of people use their tablets every day. You hold it in your lap and you poke the screen. Or you use the stand to prop it up on a table and you poke at the screen. And shockingly, your arm doesn’t fall off.
I really hope the screen no longer has the slow response and ghosting anymore. I'm surprised by the responsive difference every time I use my outdated 2013 MacBook Air's trackpad and immediately feel the difference over my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 daily driver.
For those HDR video editing / color grading specialists, how do these compare to Samsung + LG OLED TVs, Sony HDR Reference Monitors, or else?
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
I wasn't sure how I would feel about my newish MBP M5 Max when they released this, but given the price increase, and the fact that I have zero interest in a better screen since I dock most of the time, I am happy I paid $2K less for the same horsepower earlier this year.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
Sure, we wanted OLED (my ROG G14 has a wonderful screen compared to my mac).
But touch will go about as well as the touchbar did
From the top of my head, things Apple said they wouldn't do, but later did:
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
Anything else?
I am going to jump on the touch hate bandwagon but more specifically I think it’s odd in the format they designed. I think the MSFT surface is brilliant because you can fold it down into an iPad like device which can be great for travel and other non-desk uses.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
NFL announcers called the Surface tablets the teams were using "iPad-like devices": https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-nfl-surface-ipads-...
Glowing logo is back!
worth the $3k right here
Oh my god yes!!
Just make a fast, sturdy laptop, don’t keep making it lighter, and touch??
Apple directions is going insane. there is no other explanation.
They refused for decades to put a touchscreen because they know very well it will eat on their ipad sales.
One less reason to get an ipad pro.
Steve Jobs on Macbook w/ Touch:
> “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.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
Wasn't "touchscreen for a laptop" another one of those things that Apple intentionally refused to do? Is this the effect of the new leadership?
Yes it is (as people already have discussed in this thread). A link to the keynote where Steve Jobs talk about it: https://youtu.be/7zfir0Ide0A?si=fKF68UUoLhXK8cPJ
Admittedly, Apple has “refused” to do many things over the years (pen support on iPad comes to mind) and yet ends up doing them. Apple refuses to do something until they want to sell it. FWIW, I don’t understand the appeal of this device at all, but I don’t expect much consistency from Apple.
Could be cool to collect a full list. From the top of my head:
- Native mobile apps
- Bigger iPhone
- Pen, as you mentioned
- Foldable iPhone
- Now touchscreen laptop
M5 MBP owners, did Apple finally manage to fix the permanent "keyboardprint" on the screen?
I had it very badly on Intel MBP, and now on my M3 Max. I tried some screen protectors, but none of them stuck (pun intended).
I suppose touch only makes it worse?
FWIW, it forces them to have a more sturdy and touch resistant screen. They demoed the piano app, and it means a minimum of impact resistance.
Windows laptop took the same path, for the better.
Wasn’t the Touch Bar also supposed to be “a new dimension for pro workflows”.
I guess if users don’t touch it, then you just have to keep trying with something bigger to touch.
I think the audience who touches the screen to work AND uses the screen to accurately reproduce colors is basically zero
I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.
> In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.
Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.
Get a custom-made cloth or use a thin microfiber like a lens cleaning cloth and put it between the keyboard and screen. Whenever you close the computer. Keeps the smudges off and prevents key shaped wear marks in your display.
You act like you don't use a touch screen every day. Its not some crazy impossible technology to have an oleophobic display.
I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
I liked the Touch Bar for custom app actions, but I didn’t like that it replaced the physical keys. Not that I use any of them much besides volume.
The touch bar's specific advantages grew on me and I liked the slider for volume/brightness. But I definitely haven't missed it either.
I am on board for touchscreen (and pencil support) for macOS due to my dream of only carrying an iPad Pro for all development; however, I think they’re making the same mistake as the touch bar - touch is only available on the most expensive Mac’s which will ensure they’re niche. Niche options for user input ensure very few apps get updated to use the new user input (foldable phones, I’m speaking about you).
My god they finally did it. After all the fears of canibalizing iPad sales and gorilla arms. An Apple touchscreen MacBook.
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
CPU + battery in the top-cover kills the balance of the laptop and makes the whole thing heavier. It's a really awkward design compared to a clamshell laptop with a very thin display-only lid.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
No pen support is lame.
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
My god they’re really running out ideas in Cupertino. What I need is a screen that gives an electrical shock to anybody that dares to touch it with their filthy fingers.
MacBook No
MacBook Ice
If iPhone duo and touchscreen MacBook are the signs of what's to come under John Ternus then i'm really afraid for the future of Apple.
He has been CEO for all of five minutes. These products have been in development much longer.
His promotion to CEO is probably the result of leadership politics inside the company that was happening during the development of these products.
Can you use the touchscreen for the "run iPhone and iPad apps" feature of Apple Silicon Macs?
And if so, has Apple changed the policy from developer opt-in to automatic on touchscreen Macs.
This is truly groundbreaking! I've always wanted to play piano on a 14" screen.
Personal highlight: Seems like the GLOWING apple logo is back!
(don't care about the touchscreen)
Wait for real.. for real! https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/28/illuminated-logo-return...
I was gonna get it for the oled (also don’t care about touch screen) but now it’s also for the glowing logo!
so apple switches to oled. gasp. my lenovo is suddently on par with macs? apple switches to touchscreen for macs, double gasp. mostly a gimmick.
If i wanted a touch screen mb air, id get an ipad. i will actively avoid these. apple has been dropping the ball big time lately. ive noticed siri has a 5 second delay on my phone now, making reminder setting not so easy.
is graphene os ready for primetime yet?
Has been for a whole. Don't get a Pixel 11 though or wait for the new Motorola flagship.
Ah, HN is truly the successor to /., developers crying about touchscreens on laptops and gorilla arms.
Brothers, there is a market beyond your bash shells!
;p
I don't like touchscreens. I watch the people I work with who have them and none of them use theirs. How much of this was just Apple user FOMO?
2000 nits peak screen brightness with nano texture is going to look incredible outdoors. Not sure I'm feeling the need to upgrade yet but glad the brightness+coating combo will continue to be a thing
> Up to 13 more hours than Intel-based MacBook Pro
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
"Up to 2 more hours than an M1 Macbook Pro" sounds less impressive.
I expect there’s still a lot of people that haven’t upgraded yet.
Hoping for a follow-up convertible touchscreen pen-capable MacBook Air. iPad Pro is just too limiting with iPadOS and it's thicker and heavier than a MacBook Air or any of my convertible Chromebooks.
Seems like this is essentially a 400$ upgrade for the M6 Pro MacBook Pro. Those 400$ get you better sound, a better display and touch.
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
> Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
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Not an M6 Pro chip here. It's either M5 Pro or M5 Max
Years ago like 2010, 11 Microsoft had demo touchscreen computers running an art application in the Kids Room at the MOMA museum in NYC. It was responsive to actual brushes and was quite an interesting interface. As far as I knew it was a beta.
I always thought if Apple did touch on the macbook it would come with a redesign to merge macOS with touch elements from the iPad. As it stands this feels like more of an afterthought.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
I thought that they would basically replace macbooks with ipad pros. Sort of like microsoft surface, a tablet-laptop combo. Not sure what their plan is now.
No folding and no Apple Pencil support sadly, would've been a kickass 2-in-1. Would have to wait for ProCreate to be ported to macOS though
Apple finally delivers what some users have been screaming about wanting for over a decade and now… people don’t want touchscreen Macs. lol
I'm just excited the Apple logo glows again
Not a fan of touchscreen on inclined surfaces, personally. I think the ergonomics of this will be bad for shoulders/elbows.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
Does this mean that macOS will natively support touch screens so I don't need to look anymore for after-market solutions[0] for mine? That would be cool.
[0]: https://www.touch-base.com/
I’m not sure. macOS has had some degree of support for touch screens internally for a very long time (2010) but required hardware specific drivers.
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
Finger prints on my screen are a capital crime or at least family meeting time.
Will this be another touchbar? Only time will tell but I never want to touch my screen. I don't even really do it with my iPad, lol
My god the prices. Good thing I lost interest in high-end laptops. Beefy desktop + light laptop is how I roll nowadays
Same, my latency in the home (which is where I spend 99% of my time), even over WiFi, is generally <5ms, which is plenty low enough to stream the desktop to the laptop via Sunshine+Moonlight and even control fast-paced FPS games.
Since you can configure it with a 16TB SSD, I wonder, is it QLC or did Apple manage to make it TLC?
Didn't OLED screens age bad with use as with plasma back in the day? I'd rather not want a less bright mac screen in a few years.
Don't take me wrong, OLED displays on a a MacBook screen is quite a nice feat compared to regular the regular displays we have as of today.
OLED displays now are tandem OLED displays which stack multiple layers. This means you don't need to exponentially crank up the voltage to provide more brightness which also increases lengivity of the panel (and increases battery life).
I have a, what, 2019 LG CX OLED TV. 55". Used in anger as computer monitor since new. With complete disregard for burnout. It's… perfectly fine? I can't see any dimming or patterns or faults at all.
15% weight reduction over previous gen macbook pro is great.
No Apple Pencil is a huge miss for consumers. I guess they don't want to cannibalize the iPad though.
I would probably never touch the screen with my fingers, but I would draw with it. Would also be really useful during calls.
Some of my students use touchscreen Windows laptops. They seem to be OK with them but I never found them usable particularly for coding. A touchscreen laptop has ergonomically bad design. Or it could just be a generational thing.
Aside: Does anyone else find the new AI texture explosions Apple's using on their marketing pages now a little unsettling and un-Apple? I guess I'm desperate for at least one tech brand to feel / remain human.
I see. The iPad and Macbook are converging. Interesting. I can’t say I get the use case but perhaps it will fold in some interesting way that makes it usable. I have no problem using a touchscreen occasionally but in the standard configuration the screen will wobble if you touch it.
Apple's been trying (in vain?) to sell iPad users a Magic Keyboard for six years and add a windowing system to iPadOS to pretend it's a real operating system, so I suppose they're trying to bridge the gap from the opposite (Macbook) side.
Everybody worried about the usefulness of touch (which I do find occasionally useful), meanwhile they've literally set base pricing at $2900. For a 14 inch mbp, with 24GB. Hilarious.
How on god's green earth is this worth $2900?
It might not be the right machine for you and that's ok.
If I needed one of these for my work (I don't) and was going to be using it every day for the next two years, I think I could justify it. It would be about $4 / day which is within reach. Add in the fact that Mac's have decent resale value and the daily expense could be quite a bit less.
I think this is more for the generation that grew up on phones and tablets, who are now in the professional space and like that interaction model
Will the keyboard and trackpad leave a mark on the screen despite us keeping surfaces clean?
You can find the steve jobs video showing where they wouldn't make a touch screen laptop. He is probably rolling over in his grave now.
I do like how they are brining back ports. I think they need to add back the Ethernet port.
https://x.com/Cartidise/status/2115498522476994721
And look at all those glorious ports
AWw dammit I was waiting for a body refresh with M6, but this is still M5…
Why are Apple's new product lines so..self-defeating now? I wanted to get the iPhone Duo but it has worse cameras than my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and now this Mac..
Looks like a skipped year for people who want the best of everything
I've noticed this with a lot of products lately. It seems rare for a new release to strictly supersede or maintain performance on all attributes on a successor.
After having to get a windows laptop for work - I'm still in awe of my old M2 Max.. Apple makes the best general laptops out there by a wide margin
Funny how half the press release tries to hide the notch/island/whatever its called. I almost thought they gave up on that, then I finally saw it like 7 or 8 images in.
No cellular which is literally the only thing missing from the macbook pro :(
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best 2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
What’s your use case for cellular on a laptop? At least here in Canada data plans are expensive enough that I could blow through my monthly limit in 30min with a laptop. I would be quite annoyed if my wifi dropped and I had discovered only later that I’d exhausted my data unknowingly
I thought it was well known that Canada’s cellular service is far more expensive than in most other wealthy countries?
I'm always on the go, working from trains, light rails, cafes with bad internet etc.
iPhone hotspot is slow, unreliable and drains the phone's battery quickly
Luckily i'm in a country where a 600GB 5G plan costs the equivalent of 15$ a month, with 3$ per extra eSIM (watch/computer/car/whatever)
Cellular on my first iPad felt like such a waste of money. Every time I needed Internet I had Wi-Fi or my phone became a hot spot
My first iPad entirely felt like a waste of money. Any time I'd want to do something useful with it, the mac was a better choice. Not sure what cellular on the iPad would have ever offered me, but I know why I want it on my laptop.
Apparently no Apple Pencil support (not mentioned in their press release or on the sale page)
This bullet point is funny:
> Draw. Sketch and annotate directly onscreen.
I always wanted to fingerpaint my notes
Got the m5 pro like last month. Actually no FOMO this time. I wonder how the AMOLED looks irl, I bet it's sweet but the current pro motion is already top notch.
Have they figured out how to fit an LTE modem into a 16” MacBook Pro?
Or does one still have to go to Dell for that?
This means they've figured out a way to keep the screen from wobbling when poked … let the theorizing commence!
Doesn't look like it folds back or does tent mode. Those are some good use cases for touchscreen PCs, being able to walk around in tablet mode in something like a warehouse, for example.
Dynamic island looks nice.
This. No 360 hinge, no desire for a touchscreen.
You'd think Apple would understand the form factor.
The touchscreen would make sense for a hybrid laptop convertible. But in this form factor I cannot understand.
The fancy OLED display would actually be a potential reason to finally upgrade from my M1 Pro but even if I could afford it, I find prices like that hard to swallow (and I couldn't care less about touch in a laptop fwiw). Guess I'll buy one used in a year or three, maybe.
Cue the folks who have used nothing but Apple laptops for the past 20 years coming here and wondering who would possibly want a laptop with a touch screen.
I think the confusion is lot of Apple enthusiasts drank the kool-aid the company served them saying touch screen is "yuck". And now they have a touch screen, it takes a while to re-orient themselves.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
I want it for the OLED but not for the touch or glowing logo
HDMI, headphone jack, and touchscreen. Amazing.
What’s old is new again. Innovation.
So unbelievably disappointing, right after the disappointment of the Duo. I was in the market for both, the early reviews of the Duo stopped me from upgrading, and the landing page of this new Mac has stopped me from upgrading that.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
Apple said its skipping M6 for Macbook Pro -- there is no m6 pro/max -- so the next chip MBP will get is m7 in 2027. So I would hold off on buying one until next year. This is essentially a 2025 product refresh.
I'm so perplexed that they chose this product name, while still retaining their existing Macbook Pro product line.
I guess they're testing the water before turning on native iPad app support? Not sure why they wouldn't ship it straight away.
so many complains on touch screen is how i know it will be a banger
I don't like it, it still will be a popular laptop and within 5 years - one of the best. I am moving away from Apple, thank you for a ride!
Such an advanced OLED display only to be covered by fingerprints after a week of use.
They're finally getting OLED, which is one thing that's kept me on competitor laptops. They're just so much easier on my eyes.
Touch screen could be nice for running ipad apps
I am pretty sure Steve is rolling in his grave. It's pretty saddening to see Apple losing its vision, what is making MacBook Pro different than other laptops in the market? Apple silicon? Not anymore. MacOS? Probably, but it's getting worse too.
I have had touch screen laptop (Dell Inspiron), and boy, it was such a horrible and useless feature. Screen is always greasier than gas-station hot dog.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure their stock is headed for a new ATH.
The example they put front and center on the launch page is someone playing a piano keyboard on their laptop screen? WTF is going on at Apple?
That was a pretty asinine example. That’s a perfect example of where touchscreen laptops do not work.
It's sort of outrageous to launch a new product like that but not with M6, I am gonna wait for the M7 version
looks like they brought back the glowing apple logo on the lid for the first time in a decade!
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
A touch screen MacBook is a mistake.
I was hoping a 2-in-1 foldable that acts like an iPad too. I have been waiting decades for that.
Looking at all the broken Duo folding screen issues I wouldn't count on it.
Huawei made a Fold laptop that seems to be running Linux already if you're into that.
Was also hoping for this.
I like OLED screen but don't care at all for the touch screen.
The price is really high too.
I'm curious as to how the touch feature will work (if at all) with privacy screens.
how did they reduce the weight? the design looks the same
tandem OLED is one of those techniques that makes me think "why didn't we just do this in the first place?"
Does it support the Pencil?
Is there any reason this wouldn't work with an apple pencil too?
I think if they did support Apple Pencil they’d have used that as a selling point.
It's ergonomically terrible.
It doesn't work.
Steve Jobs said this in October 2010 during Apple's "Back to the Mac" special event, where the company was previewing Mac OS X Lion.
Everything is going down the drain right in front of our eyes.
I can't make sense of any counterargument as anything but copium.
It's very unfortunate that there now isn't a single desktop operating system not ruined by touchscreen support.
Ah, touch is awful! Nasty ass fingerprints on your display, no thanks. It it means they're going to fuck up the UI even more for touch compatibility.
This is disappointing, I was hoping they were going to do something interesting with the display hinge to make it make sense as a touch interface. Can’t see it being useful as is.
Will touch and dynamic island be supported in clamshell mode? Can they be enabled in other Macs?
No gorilla glass for gorilla arm?
Please tell me the rounded corners at the bottom of the screen are just for the effect and they aren't actually physically like that. This would be worse than the current notch, you can even see them clipping the text in the LM Studio picture.
Touch screen on a laptop is objectively disgusting. I have a Lenovo yoga X1 or something with a touch screen (and it folds backwards into a tablet) hence the name. It is stupid and useless. I can imagine Steve Jobs turning in his grave right now.
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
I like how I can see its screen quality on my screen.
Cellular?
the angle they show for music is sooo unnatural, what a gimmick
Dynamic Island looks good. I am glad I picked up an M5 max prior to the price hike.
"A hole in my screen looks good"
This is so bizarre. I'll never understand Apple fans.
Touch screens are dead, no one ever said good things about them. Also, I think the best setup now (regardless macos or linux) is having your heavy lifting compute at home and you use something like macbook air and ssh into it, that way you get the best portability and also you are secure if your laptop is lost.
A massive overpriced laptop with a novelty touch feature on its monitor gets free promotion on HN. Ah well.
Touchscreens on vertical screens are ridiculous.
Especially if they don't even have stylus support
no point in upgrading from m3 max atm. (it seems)
Looking forward to running Gentoo with Asahi patches on this some day.
I feel Apple had to release a touch display to quiet all the few complainers out there. And the next version won't have touch.
> PROLED
Really... I would expect this naming from an Onion article.
At this point an Apple robot or car make more sense than a touchscreen.
I have never wanted a touch screen on my laptop. I still don't. Who is this for?
If the screen were detachable and you get a giant 16'' ipad, I would consider it. I do not want touch interface on a laptop and will never buy this. I do want non-touch OLED screen though.
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
Very worried to see it's 1mm thinner. The existing macbook pro was already struggling way too much with heat. And now they shave off 1mm.
I just don’t understand stabbing pointed fingers at the screen to use it vs tapping the pads of my fingers like an iPad.
Besides holding my arms up it’s also painful to keep my wrists bent to get a better angle for my fingers to articulate.
devices have become so expensive you can now lease them like a car..you will own nothing and be happy
is it just me or a lot of Apple's copies these days seem too LLM generated?
Why would anyone touch their screen? Madness.
The product itself is fine, I have no strong opinions on it. But what a hell of a disappointing unveiling.
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
There is apparently an in-person event that is not livestreamed. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/apple-touchscreen-macboo...
Makes sense this event is in LA- this this is designed to be a mobile media creation device. Most users don't care about most of the features that are highlighted in the press release, but someone creating any sort of visual media would.
That's cold comfort, unless the influencers were meant to livestream it themselves… which I still don't particularly like, but it's something?
As someone who does coding and art, I’m disappointed that there’s no Apple Pencil support. Makes touch feel more like a gimmick.
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I fail to see how Terminal.app benefits from a touchscreen, so what's the point? /s
I would not buy this, unless you can fold the machine's screen backwards beyond 120° and use it like an iPad.
So without that, having touch doesn't make any sense and once again, won't buy this unless the second generation of touch Macbooks are available.
Worked well with the first foldable iPhone Duo didn't it? /s
M5 chips instead of m6 are SO DISAPPOINTING! looks like a good laptop otherwise though
M5 pro or max which is better than the m6. There is no m6 pro/max
But I assume they are planned/developed at this point, why not release it with the new Pro?
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