In 2010, a year before his death, Steve Jobs dismissed the idea of a touchscreen laptop, calling it “ergonomically terrible”. Two years later, Cook, Jobs’ successor, doubled down when investors asked whether the MacBook and iPad would someday merge into one product. He compared the idea to combining a toaster with a refrigerator.

But today, Ternus presented a touchscreen as the natural next step for the Mac.

“As we like to do around here, we asked ourselves: How do we make the MacBook Pro even better?” Ternus said. “This display provides so much more than touch.”

The new Mac will start at US$2899 ($5000) and be available November 6. Apple also upgraded its chips and microphones and added a brighter and more vivid screen to the laptop. It is thinner and lighter than its predecessor.

In demonstrations today, Apple showed off how its touchscreen laptop could be used for work including graphic design and music production. It also emphasised the performance of the laptop in researching and running artificial intelligence.

Apple has made an about-face on products before. In 2010, Jobs mocked competitors who were making miniature tablets and said they should be sold with sandpaper so people could file their fingers down to use them. But two years later, Cook introduced the iPad mini, a product that he said he personally believed in.

Apple was not the first to create any of its new products. The biggest makers of personal computers – Lenovo, HP and Dell – each sell touchscreen laptops. But touchscreen laptops have yet to become mainstream. In the first half of this year, touchscreen laptops accounted for 16% of all laptop shipments, according to IDC, which tracks consumer electronics markets.

Still, with the new MacBook Pro, Apple is betting that it can win the market with a more polished device and a supply chain that can quickly deliver millions of products.

Like nearly all consumer electronics companies, Apple is raising prices because the components it uses are becoming more expensive, due in part to the AI (artificial intelligence) boom that is causing demand for memory chips to skyrocket. Apple raised the prices of its Macs in June, with the base model of the MacBook Pro increasing US$300 to US$1999.

A splashy new feature can be an incentive for consumers to overlook higher price tags, said Jitesh Ubrani, a director of consumer devices research at IDC. He added the touchscreen laptop might appeal to people in creative businesses who spend more time editing photos and videos.

“One way to justify that price increase is to give more features,” Ubrani said. “You could add to that and make it seem like a better value.”

But for Apple, which once said its process for designing products had “1000 ‘no’s for every ‘yes’,” churning out many new types of products creates new risks.

The company now sells six types of Macs, six types of iPhones and four types of iPads, each with minor distinctions and with many options on features including screen size, storage capacity and the type of glass for a screen. That can confuse consumers.

Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst who worked in product marketing at Apple from 2013-16, said Apple’s current product strategy reminded him of the 1990s, when Apple was run by John Sculley and nearing bankruptcy. At the time, the company offered a wide range of computers. When Jobs became chief executive again, he killed most of the products to focus on just a few.

Today, Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world, with a market capitalisation of US$5 trillion ($8 trillion). But the new strategy, Gartenberg said, is still “such a nontraditional Apple way of doing things”.

“It sort of feels like it’s 1000 ‘yeses’ for every ‘no’,” Gartenberg said. “Whatever we’ve got cooking in the lab, just put them out there.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Kalley Huang and Brian X. Chen

Photographs by: David Fouts

©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES