Apple has long rejected the idea of a touchscreen Mac, so moving ahead with one was always going to be a major shift in the company's thinking. In 2010, Steve Jobs argued that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical," citing the arm fatigue that comes from repeatedly reaching up to a screen. Some would call this sacrilege...
More than a decade later, in 2021, Apple's then-hardware engineering chief John Ternus remarked that the Mac was made exclusively for indirect input and that Apple saw no compelling reason to change its approach. "We make the world's best touch computer on an iPad. It's totally optimized for that. And the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven't really felt a reason to change that," Ternus said in an interview with Joanna Stern. Touch Comes to the Mac
Fast forward to 2026, and Apple has had a change of heart. The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR is the first Mac to adopt touchscreen technology. Many younger people who grew up with smartphones and tablets expect to interact with their computers the same way they do with their mobile devices, and that expectation appears to have twisted Apple's arm (no pun intended). Of course, just because the new MacBook Pro models have a touchscreen doesn't mean you have to use it. If you forget it's even there, you can turn off the function and pretend it doesn't exist. If you use Sidecar with an iPad on another Mac, you can turn off touch in the same way.
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