Apple News

Apple’s upcoming high-end MacBook update is poised to introduce a major leap forward with a touch-enabled OLED display, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg News, marking Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook and its debut of OLED tech in the lineup (following the iPad Pro’s adoption).

Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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Apple’s next high-end MacBook Pro update will feature a touch-enabled OLED display — a component that will almost certainly raise the overall price.

When Apple switched the iPad to OLED, its starting price rose by roughly 20%. A similar change with the iPhone in 2017 pushed the base price to $1,000 for the first time.

Given that history, these upcoming laptops will likely sit above the current M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, rather than replace them.

While Apple could keep the traditional MacBook Pro name, a “MacBook Ultra” label would more clearly signal their position at the top of the lineup. One thing is certain: Apple, yet again, is moving firmly upmarket.

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MacDailyNews Take: Overcoming our aversion to having fingers touching our MacBook Pro displays will likely prove to be an impossible task.

We’re perfectly fine with using mice and trackpads, so we’ll continue to keep our Mac displays free of greasy fingerprints, even if we end up with touchscreen Macs.

Who really wants to smear their fingers all over their MacBook Pro’s display?

Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. – Steve Jobs

For many years, every MacBook Pro has offered a built-in multi-touch-capable Force Touch trackpad.

Does it make more sense to be smearing your fingers around on your notebook’s screen or on a spacious trackpad that’s designed specifically and solely to be touched? … The iPhone’s screen has to be touched; that’s all it has available. A MacBook’s screen does not have to be touched in order to offer Multi-Touch. — MacDailyNews, March 26, 2009

I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, remarking on the idea of a converged Mac and iPad, April 25, 2012

We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do. I don’t think we’ve looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there? — Apple SVP Craig Federighi, June 5, 2018

[Y]ou get this in-between thing, and in-between things are never as good as the individual things themselves. We believe the best personal computer is a Mac, and we want to keep going down that path. And we think the best tablet computing device is an iPad, and we’ll go down that path.

iPad benefits because we assume that you need to be able to do most everything with touch, and we don’t have to trade off on that experience. Mac assumes you want to do most everything with a keyboard and mouse input. We don’t have to trade off on that path. You can look at some of the other products that will try to go halfway between the two. They end up just compromising experiences. That’s not good. – Apple SVP Phil Schiller, November 13, 2019

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