// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
The Inside Story of Why Apple Finally Brought a Touch Display to the Mac
It’s a bright day in Cupertino. Apple’s new CEO strolls to an outdoor seating area within the company’s otherworldly ring-shaped headquarters and pulls up a chair. An employee notes the angle and asks if he minds the sun. John Ternus doesn’t mind at all.
Nearly two months into his tenure, he’s been busy. While the tech world buzzes about AI agents and the upcoming IPO of a company reporting spectacular losses, Ternus’ leadership of a ridiculously profitable firm has so far been defined by a sequence of significant launches—the long-awaited foldable iPhone, a household device that can control digital appliances, new Mac Minis, and AirPods. Intentionally or not, all that activity sends a message that, even as AI dominates the public imagination, hardware products still rule.
Ternus doesn’t endorse that take, but he doesn’t object when I suggest it. “We’ve been working on these products for quite some time,” he says. “It feels like everyone here is just kind of riding high right now, enjoying it.”
I ask if Apple is about to break a long-imposed taboo and introduce a Macintosh with a touch screen.
We are referring to the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display that Apple is releasing today at an event in Los Angeles. It’s got a mighty M5 Pro or M5 Max chip and a show-stopping tandem OLED screen. (A tandem screen has multiple light-emitting layers, producing more dramatic contrasts.) But its most conspicuous feature is one that’s been deeply woven into iPhones, iPads, and even Apple Watches for years but not Apple’s laptops: a touch display. After years of resistance, a Mac screen has finally gone digital. As in fingers.
This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.”
Ternus and Apple want to make sure that the Mac faithful don’t panic that the 42-year-old franchise is losing its identity to Apple’s gangbusters mobile products. “We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn’t make the product lesser in any way. It didn’t make it heavier. It didn’t make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we’ve ever put into a Mac,” Ternus told me. “All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well.”
Apple has a long history of refusing to implement certain desirable features, only to pivot when it feels the time is right. Steve Jobs once proclaimed iPods would never do video, until they did. He also once said “no one’s going to buy” a jumbo-size phone—and then Apple released a supersized iPhone 6. Then there was that time Jobs declared styluses inappropriate for tablets. Now the Apple Pencil works with iPads and the brand-new Duo.
The 2026 MacBook Pro instantly qualifies as the canonical example of this switcheroo. Apple executives had been on record regarding touch on PCs as a misbegotten idea. Never mind that just about every PC maker not headquartered in Cupertino has implemented touch on their laptops. And customers of Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and HP have snapped them up. Clearly, people wanted touch on their laptop displays. Even toddlers knew it—put some rugrats in front of a computer and their little arms shoot straight to the screen in futile attempts to swipe and scroll as they do on their iPads. People were baffled why Apple—the pioneer in touch displays since the iPhone—was so steadfast in its rejection.
In 2015, while doing a story about a new iMac, I pressed Phil Schiller, then the senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, on this very question. Usually, top Apple executives field such queries with cryptic remarks. In this case, Schiller began a filibuster. “I’m going to get a little bit philosophical,” he said, and launched into what I later described as the Grand Unified Theory of Apple Hardware.