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:
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.
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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I don’t think Apple will do it, already tried it in a limited way with TouchBar (only on MacBook Pro). A touch screen that’s only on MacBook Pro (and maybe only this one “Ultra” model) will be like a HUGE TouchBar, NOT universally available to all Mac users, unlikely to not be extensively supported by developers for that reason (like with TouchBar). Even for same user of same touchscreen MacBook, touchscreen interface available on built-in display, but at home it’s NOT available on fancy 27-inch Studio Display when connected to MacBook. Apple already has a touchscreen laptop, iPad Pro (or Air) with keyboard/trackpad accessory attached, especially after iPadOS 26 added windows app.
An OLED, touch screen MacBook Pro seems to me to be, at best, a stopgap measure.
As ken1w points out, what good is a MacBook Pro touch screen if the monitor(s) to which it is connected don’t support a touch screen interface too? Apple’s newest monitors do not support touch screens, and at the rate Apple refreshes its monitors (or really the lack there of) it is unlikely Apple will come out with a monitor that supports touch screens within the next four years — if ever. Using touch screens on the road (without a second or third monitor) then using one or more larger, higher resolution monitors at home or office makes the user have to switch between two radically different interfaces. That’s something that the Mac concept has been against since its inception!
Some old timers recall the 12 (13?) volume set of books (hardbound books you could buy at several book stores) Apple published on how developers should do a consistent “Mac Interface”. Some may recall that the Mac pushed for standard things like command-Q for quitting any application and almost all developers complied, while on the Windows side there were more than a half dozen different ways to quit an application. Some of you may recall the very early Mac ad where the narrator said “This is what you need to run a PC.” (paraphrasing) while multiple three ring binders dropped onto the table followed by “This is what you need to run Macintosh.” (again, paraphrasing) whereupon a single, relatively thin document dropped onto the table — dramatically showing how the Mac had a single, simple, consistent, easy to learn interface. That concept was replicated with the iMac “There’s no step three.” ad.
I’m looking forward to the day when Apple is shipping micro LED displays on MacBook Pro models. OLED is OK, but micro LED will easily be recognized as better. Micro LED will achieve significantly brighter images than OLED. Brightness is one of the reasons mini LED is holding its own against OLED, even thought OLED has better blacks. But, micro LED will have just as good blacks and brighter brights. Yes, in order to have a high resolution (> 200 psi) display the micro LEDs need to get a bit smaller, and larges panels must get into production, but I believe it will happen. Hopefully within the next four or so years.
But, a touch screen MacBook Pro? I can’t imagine myself ever using that variant of a Mac interface.
Tim how many products have leverage left. I suppose you can put up the price of redesigned chargers or cables. You have to innovate new products are required. Ok you screwed up big time with the car you cost the company billions (no one will ever know) ignored all the other innovative opportunities got rid of clever people while you obsessed with this. Get over it you made a huge mistake. Now innovate stop the buy backs take a gamble on new clever people you don’t understand and can’t control maybe they come up with something new their names will become famous dont worry you’ll still have a legacy. Better than being remembered as a film and TV guy company that ruined a tech company
Hey, Grok, please rewrite in proper english:
Tim Cook,
How much runway do your current products really have left in terms of meaningful leverage and growth?
You could perhaps raise prices on redesigned chargers or cables, but that’s hardly transformative. The company desperately needs true innovation — entirely new products to reignite excitement and momentum.
Let’s be frank: the Apple Car (Project Titan) was a colossal misstep. It burned billions (a figure the public may never fully know) over a decade, distracted leadership from far more promising opportunities, and led to the departure of talented people while the obsession continued. It was a huge mistake — time to move on and acknowledge it.
Now is the moment to refocus: stop prioritizing massive stock buybacks, take calculated risks on bold, visionary talent — the kind of clever, uncontrollable innovators you may not fully understand or be able to manage. Let them run with ideas that could produce something groundbreaking. Their names might become legendary, but you’ll still secure a strong legacy as the leader who handed the baton to the next era of “insanely great.”
Anything would be better than being remembered as the CEO who turned Apple into a content-and-services company that coasted on past hardware glory and let a once-revolutionary tech giant grow stale. The clock is ticking — innovate or risk irrelevance.
It would have been a far greater blunder to release an ‘Apple Auto’ into a stagnating and increasingly saturated EV market on the verge of being flooded by cheap Chinese cars and facing stiff competition from Tesla, Rivian, Lucid and others. ~$10 billion over half a decade is a rounding error for Apple. A better CEO would have either pushed the project through to completion (not focusing on full self driving fantasy) and either released something or shelved it much sooner, but I think they made the right choice to pull the plug.
It’s a bit rich to complain about a lack of ‘innovation’ when Tesla for example is iterating on just two core models (3/Y) while shelving the X and S in favor of vaporware robots. Their ‘innovative’ CyberTruck has largely been a failure. For all of Apple’s faults they consistently ship rock-solid products and are increasingly dominating the computer and mobile hardware markets. Apple AI was the lone recent exception of something they hyped and didn’t deliver on, yet…
I’d argue that all of Apple’s hardware products and much of the software IS “insanely great”. We’ve just taken it for granted for so long that it just fades into the background except for the occasional bug or design change the tech media hyperventilates about. Aside from a folding iPhone (which Apple will release this year), there is no other computer product made by Apple’s competitors that I wish Apple had made.
No, the software is not insanely great. It’s been dumbed down, made illegible, and crippled compared to where everything was 15 years ago. Glassy look sucks. Mac commands are hidden or removed to make everything look like iOS.
Functional example: compare what Aperture could do compared to the freebie crapware that is Photos today. Apple removed the option for users to purchase a proper photo database and photo project management tool because … why?!?!?!?!? So we could rent from Adobe???????????????
Apple and all other software makers are incessantly pushing the rental + ads + datamining way too far. There isn’t much of a “personal computer” left with clear user control and privacy. None of the software, especially the overhyped AI junk, “just works”. Apple is almost as bad as the usual Big Tech offenders, at least they are slow rolling the AI crapware that makes up $hit as it goes along.