Apple shows pricey touchscreen laptops, a first for the iPhone maker

LOS ANGELES - Apple chief executive officer John Ternus unveiled the company’s first touchscreen MacBooks on Oct 28, abandoning a long-held aversion to the technology as it caps a burst of product launches ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Ternus took the stage at an Apple event in Los Angeles and showed a MacBook Pro model with an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, playing up the display’s contrast, sharpness and brightness in front of an audience of content creators and creative professionals.

He also said the company would return to a glowing logo on the back of the laptops.

“Look, we love the Mac, and it’s the reason why so many of us found our way to Apple in the first place. And the Mac has never been better, and it’s never been stronger,” Ternus said on Oct 28.

The event is part of a media blitz filled with new product launches following Ternus – a former Apple hardware veteran – taking over as the company’s new CEO.

He launched a folding iPhone, Duo, at Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters in September and a smart home hub in New York earlier this month. While those products will test new markets for Apple, the Los Angeles event could rekindle an old question: Should Apple put the touchscreens that it made mainstream in iPhones and iPads in its oldest product line?

Apple executives long resisted the idea, with Steve Jobs saying in 2010 that touchscreens on laptops were “ergonomically terrible” and then-CEO Tim Cook saying in 2012 that such devices would be as pleasing to users as converging a toaster and a refrigerator.

Before becoming Apple’s CEO, Ternus argued that Apple already made a touchscreen computer with its iPad lineup.

But touchscreens have been widely available for more than a decade on Windows devices, and with the iPhone nearing its two-decade anniversary, a new generation of buyers expects screens to respond to touch.

“I believe they were always wrong on pushing back on touch, and this is the long arm of reality setting in,” said Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Some things are purely inevitable.”

A key question for Apple is how customers will respond. The company has seen an uptick in Mac sales, but much of that growth has been among technology enthusiasts and businesses buying the machines to handle AI tasks on-device.

Apple said on Oct 28 that the new MacBook Pro is available for pre-order starting Oct 28 and would go on sale on Nov 6.

The new MacBook Pro starts at US$2,899 (S$3,700) for the 14-inch model with the M5 Pro chip, while the highest-end configuration starts at US$4,799 for the 16-inch model with the more powerful M5 Max chip. The new 16-inch model is 0.7 pounds lighter than the older, non-touchscreen model. REUTERS