Apple has finally made a touchscreen MacBook Pro, and you know what? Good.

I’ve been using touchscreen Windows laptops for well over a decade. Microsoft made touch central to Windows with Windows 8 in 2012, and PC makers have spent the years since experimenting with convertibles, detachable keyboards, pens, dual-screen PCs, foldable displays, and nearly every combination of those ideas imaginable.

There’s an obvious temptation here to point and laugh, particularly given how long Apple spent telling everyone that touchscreen laptops were a bad idea. But I don’t think Apple adopting touch in 2026 is really the problem. Technology improves. Consumer behavior changes. Companies reconsider old assumptions. Ideas that didn't make sense 15 years ago can make considerably more sense today.

Companies should be allowed to change their minds. In fact, I wish more of them would.

What bothers me is the corporate absolutism that so often comes before the reversal, and how readily consumers absorb those talking points and repeat them as though they were established technological truths.

Steve Jobs didn't merely say that Apple wasn't interested in making a touchscreen Mac. In 2010, he argued that vertical touch surfaces were “ergonomically terrible” and that after using one for an extended period, “your arm wants to fall off.”

Apple continued defending that philosophy long after Jobs. Craig Federighi argued that reaching up to touch a screen was fatiguing, while John Ternus explained Apple's position in 2021 by saying the iPad was optimized for touch and the Mac for indirect input.

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