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

• Apple launched its first touchscreen MacBooks in Los Angeles, led by CEO John Ternus, ending years of resistance to touch on laptops.
• The new MacBook Pro has an OLED display, starts at US$2,899, and goes on sale on Nov 6. Apple says it is aimed at creators and designers.
• Analysts say Apple faces a crowded market where cheaper touchscreen laptops are common. The move may help Apple reach more buyers, but success is not certain.

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 in October.

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 line-up.

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.”

How will customers respond?

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.

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.

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.

“This is going to be towards creators, towards designers, towards photographers, people that are going to leverage that high fidelity screen, and who many of whom have grown up tapping on screens, editing on tablets, on phones, etc,” said Tom Mainelli, head of IDC’s Device & Consumer Research Group.

To guard against burn-in, a common OLED flaw where images from long-running apps leave permanent marks on the screen, Apple redesigned the chassis to draw warm air away from the display and used the computing power in its M5 chips to keep the screen refreshed.

“You can expect an OLED to last as long as your typical LCD screen. Apple came out of the gate firing in terms of putting together both a very vibrant display and then adding the touch,” Mainelli said.

Still, some analysts questioned how much headway Apple can make in a market dominated by enterprise buyers, where rivals such as Lenovo, HP and Dell offer cheaper devices.

PC makers shipped 33.4 million touchscreen notebooks in 2025, up 22% from a year earlier and 16% of all notebooks shipped, according to IDC. The average selling price for the devices was around US$1,009, much lower than Apple’s products.

The cheapest touchscreen laptop Apple unveiled on Oct 28 also costs more than an entry-level iPhone, MacBook, iPad with accessories, Apple Watch and AirPods combined.

But the expanding line-up of products and prices suggests that the company is chasing budget-conscious buyers without losing its premium customers, in an early sign of how Ternus might broaden its appeal. REUTERS