// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
We’ve had touchscreen laptops for years. Can Apple make them better?
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Apple is poised to reverse course on a feature its executives openly mocked.
Apple is poised to reverse course on a feature its executives openly mocked.
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A fridge is about to be merged with a toaster. Dogs and cats are soon to be living together. But it’s not mass hysteria; Apple is expected to finally announce a touchscreen MacBook tomorrow at its “Pro and Tell” event.
A laptop with a touchscreen should be no big deal — we’ve had them for ages. But Apple took a hardline stance against them. In addition to Tim Cook’s infamous 2012 quote equating it to combining kitchen appliances, Steve Jobs emphatically dismissed touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible” back in 2010, saying, “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
The closest Apple got was the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, from 2016 to 2023, but that horizontal landing strip for your fingers on the keyboard deck mostly amounted to unrealized potential. It sacrificed physical function keys (and for a while, the escape key) in favor of a non-deterministic UI. A touchscreen on a laptop is an established idea we already know can be useful for taking direct action on things around your screen — whether with an occasional tap and flick or through prolonged stylus use.