Apple preps MacBook Pro with touchscreen

An Apple patent illustration from several years ago depicted an iPad as a MacBook display (source: USPTO)
Apple is working on a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen for late 2026 or early 2027, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
‎

The new machines, code-named K114 and K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips.
The new laptops will feature displays with OLED technology — short for organic light-emitting diode — the same standard used in iPhones and iPad Pros, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. It will mark the first time that this higher-end, thinner system is used in a Mac.
The touch-screen MacBook Pro will retain a full trackpad and keyboard… users won’t have to rely on the touch display if they don’t want to.
For the revamped MacBook Pro, Apple is retiring the “notch” — the cutout at the top of the screen that houses the camera. In its place, the company will adopt a so-called hole-punch design that leaves a display area around the sensor. This will be similar in concept to the Dynamic Island on the iPhone.
The company has also developed a reinforced hinge and screen hardware to prevent the display from bouncing back or moving when touched, a common drawback of existing touch PCs.
Because of the pricier components, the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are likely to cost a few hundred dollars more than current versions. Today’s non-touch models with high-end chips start at $1,999 for the 14-inch version and $2,499 for the larger one.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: According to Gurman, Apple isn’t actively developing any additional touchscreen Macs (read: MacBook Air). Instead, it’ll wait to gauge the market’s reaction to the touchscreen version of the MacBook Pro.
Since we’re perfectly fine with using mice and trackpads, we’ll continue to keep our Mac displays free of greasy fingerprints, even if Apple releases touchscreen Macs.
Do you really want to smear your fingers all over your 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

‎
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post Apple preps MacBook Pro with touchscreen appeared first on MacDailyNews.