On October 28, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display – the first Mac built with a touchscreen. The 14in model starts at US$2,899 (RM11,734) and the 16in at US$3,399 (RM13,758).
For the past 16 years, a Mac with a touchscreen seemed out of the question. At Apple’s Back to the Mac event in October 2010, Steve Jobs said the company had run extensive testing on vertical touchscreens and concluded that touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. On an earnings call in 2012, Tim Cook compared a converged laptop and tablet to a toaster crossed with a refrigerator. And in 2014, SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi said that Apple was not that interested in building a touchscreen Mac.
Those quotes have been wheeled out every time a report claimed Apple had a touchscreen Mac in development. It was almost as though Apple had set its position in stone and couldn’t change its mind.
And Jobs was right – 16 years ago.
He was relaying decades of ergonomics research into what engineers called “gorilla arm,” the fatigue that sets in when an arm is held up unsupported to reach a vertical surface. The panels, hinges, and silicon available in 2010 could not have produced a machine that avoided the problem. His answer was accurate in October 2010, but Apple isn’t working with the same hardware today.
Tandem OLED, a reworked hinge, and a decade of Apple’s custom silicon have removed the compromises that made touch a downgrade for the Mac. On the new MacBook Pro, Apple has built the touchscreen to be used alongside the trackpad rather than as a replacement for it – which would have been the very thing Jobs was arguing against.
Jobs’s argument is still quoted as evidence that Apple has lost its nerve or its founder’s taste. People seem to overestimate Apple’s past decisions and remain reluctant for the company to change its mind, even when the time is right.
The warning Jobs left behind
Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, explained that Apple had to solve a few problems before it would put touch on a Mac, naming custom silicon to drive the panel, a thermal system that keeps the display from warming under a finger, and a hinge stiff enough that pressing the screen doesn’t rock it. He recently told Wired that he wants his engineers “gated by physics, not imagination or timelines.” That high standard is one aspect of Jobs’s vision that has carried forward into the modern Apple.
Jobs knew his answers might later be treated as doctrine, and he tried to stop it. At his memorial in October 2011, Cook told Apple employees that one of the last pieces of advice Jobs gave him was to never ask what he would do. Jobs had watched the Walt Disney Company spend years after its founder’s death asking what Walt would have wanted. He didn’t want Apple run that way.
A year later, in a December 2012 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Cook said one of the most under-appreciated things about Jobs was his courage to change his mind. Apple changed its mind repeatedly in the 14 years Cook spent as CEO. Much of the commentary has treated each change as Apple “losing something” rather than simply making a decision.
But there is a difference between honouring a company’s history and simply repeating it.
For Apple, honouring its history meant waiting to release a touchscreen Mac only when it wouldn’t be a worse laptop than the one it replaced. New CEO John Ternus told Wired that this is what the holdup was, since touch could not be allowed to make the machine heavier, thicker, or compromised anywhere else.
Two months under Ternus
Ternus became chief executive of Apple on Sept 1. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Ternus has made product design a major priority and works hands-on in the design studio, which has drawn comparisons to Jobs.
The first product released under the new CEO – the iPhone Duo – went on sale on October 23 for US$1,999 (RM8,091). It’s the most expensive iPhone Apple has made and its first foldable phone, seven years after Samsung shipped the original Galaxy Fold. Before the Duo arrived, Apple was repeatedly told that it had “missed the category.” But when pre-orders for the Duo opened on October 16, delivery estimates quickly slipped into late January. That’s a strange outcome for a product that supposedly arrived too late to market, don’t you think?
The iPad mini is proof that when Apple changes its mind, it’s often for good reason. Jobs dismissed small tablets in 2010, saying a 7in tablet would need to ship with sandpaper so owners could file their fingers down. Apple built one anyway in 2012 and has regularly updated it ever since, because customers like it so much. On October 26, the iPad mini received what Apple calls its biggest update ever – primarily driven by an 8.5in OLED display. That’s a pretty good track record for a product the company’s founder said shouldn’t exist.
The touchscreen Mac has the weakest commercial case of anything Apple has shipped recently, which goes to show that the company moved on its own judgment rather than following the market. Ryan Reith – who runs IDC’s worldwide device trackers – told CNBC that touchscreens will only appear on roughly 17% of notebooks shipped globally this year. Touch has been on Windows laptops since Windows 8 arrived in 2012 and has never become a reason to buy one, in large part because it usually gets added to an existing chassis rather than designed into it. Apple has entered premium touchscreen notebooks at US$2,899 (RM11,734), in the same year IDC expects PC shipments to fall 11.3%, Macs included.
Apple has made the same kind of call on AI, where the stakes are considerably larger. It spent 2025 and the first half of 2026 being described as the company that missed the moment. Infamously, the company’s rebuilt Siri slipped past the release date Apple gave for it. Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple’s foundation models team, left for Meta on a pay package reported at around US$200mil (RM809mil). Analyst Dan Ives wrote in 2025 that AI innovation at Apple was not coming from inside Apple Park.
Apple’s answer to this criticism was to abandon one of the positions it had held the longest. Rather than build frontier models itself or buy the data centres to train them, it now pays Google for access to Gemini, which powers the revamped Siri. For a company that has always aimed to control the entire product stack, handing the hardest part to a competitor is a bigger decision than a touchscreen MacBook. And it’s one that seems to have paid off. Between June 25 and July 10 this year, Apple added almost US$600bil (RM2.43 trillion) in value – a 15% run that made it the best performer among the Magnificent Seven for 2026.
Jobs feared a future Apple that would waste time in meetings asking what he would have wanted. That conversation happens constantly now, outside of Apple, every time the company ships something new. So far, Apple has ignored this noise and felt free to change its mind, and the results rather speak for themselves. – Inc./Tribune News Service
