Apple May Finally Add Touch Screens to Macs

Apple is working on Macs that offer a touch screen, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. 

In a recent article, Gurman reported that the iPhone maker could launch its first touchscreen Mac as early as 2025. According to Gurman, the feature would be available in the Pro variant MacBooks.

Gurman also noted that additional updates would rollout to these rumored MacBook Pros beyond the inclusion of a touchscreen, such as screens with OLED technology instead of the Mini LED displays currently found in the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which were released in October 2021. Of course, this is a report; keep this with a grain of salt.

The closest Apple got to launching a MacBook with a touchscreen was in 2016 when the company released the Touch Bar. Additionally, Apple previously made prototype Macs with touch screens that were never released as final products, as Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, told CNET back in 2016. 

If Apple were to launch a Mac with a touch screen, it certainly would be an interesting pivot for the company that previously wanted to avoid the idea of producing touchscreen Macs. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said back in 2010 that a touchscreen on something like a laptop was “ergonomically terrible.” In 2012, when asked by analysts to comment on the release of the Microsoft Surface hybrid tablet, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that it was “a fairly compromised, confusing product.” 

A Mac with a touch screen would be placed in an interesting position in both the market and Apple’s ecosystem. While laptops with touch screens are nothing new, having been around for years on Windows OS-based laptops, Apple has been slowly turning the iPad into a “laptop lite” device.

Aside from the iPad having many keyboard accessories like the Logitech Combo Touch and the Magic Keyboard, Apple has even put its ARM-based system on a chip, the M1 (and M2 with the most recent iPad Pro models), into the iPad Air and iPad Pro models. 

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.