Touchscreen MacBook Pro Reportedly Arrives Wednesday With OLED

Apple is set to unveil its first touchscreen Mac on Wednesday. The new MacBook Pro comes in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes with an OLED display, a first for any Mac, and it is expected to cost well above the current $2,499 starting price. Mark Gurman reports in his latest Power On newsletter that the machine is a higher-end MacBook Pro that looks like today’s models but weighs less.

It also adds the Dynamic Island from the iPhone. The launch lands at Apple’s Pro and Tell event on October 28. macOS Golden Gate gets a touch-aware interface Apple has tweaked macOS Golden Gate so the Mac responds differently depending on how you are using it. The system tracks whether you have been touching the display or using the trackpad, then shows controls to match.

Tapping a button can bring up a menu around your finger, and the Dock and Menu Bar have been optimized for touch. The groundwork has been visible for weeks in the macOS Golden Gate 27.2 betas . Apple plans to present touch as an extra input that sits next to the keyboard and trackpad, and it will stress that the Mac is not turning into an iPad hybrid.

Gurman tried it and says reaching up to a vertical display gets uncomfortable after a few seconds. The ergonomics problem Steve Jobs described is still there. Apple is walking back 16 years of public opposition to touch Macs Jobs called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible” in 2010.

Tim Cook later compared a tablet-laptop hybrid to merging a toaster and a fridge, Phil Schiller laughed off the idea, and Craig Federighi said touch was not the right interface. Even John Ternus, now CEO, dismissed the concept a few years ago. Gurman says Apple accelerated development four years ago, when pandemic work-from-home orders pushed Mac and iPad sales up.

Cook and Ternus both felt customers had started to expect touch on a Mac, though the industrial design team stayed opposed. The compromise was a machine where touch is optional. Money plays a part too.

OLED raises costs and gives Apple room to charge more, the same play it made with the Retina MacBook Pro in 2012. Touch laptops from Lenovo, Dell and HP make up only about 20% to 25% of shipments. The Mac laptop lineup gets more crowded on Wednesday Apple will sell the $699 MacBook Neo, the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air, the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, the higher-performance 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, and the new OLED touch tier.

Gurman expects Apple to merge the touch and non-touch high-end models eventually, as it did with the Retina MacBook Pro. The entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro gets an M6 chip on Wednesday in its current design, with a redesigned version planned for next year. Apple is also testing OLED versions of the MacBook Air and iMac, but neither is close.

A new non-OLED iMac is coming this week, and a refreshed non-OLED MacBook Air is due early next year. Newsletter Never miss an Apple story One email a day, the news that matters. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.