Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Steve Jobs didn’t reject the possibility of Apple adding touch input to Macs. I remember that only because he told me so himself, when I squeezed in the last question during a post-keynote Q&A at Apple’s headquarters on October 14, 2008.

As far as I know, there’s no video of our brief exchange. But here’s the account I wrote later that day, in which I report that Jobs said Apple had tested the concept. According to Engadget’s liveblog, he added, “So far, it hasn’t made a lot of sense to us.” Implicitly, that left open the possibility that it could make sense someday.

Someday came this week. On Wednesday, Apple announced its first touchscreen Macs, 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with a PRO OLED XDR display. Starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch version—and configurable up to a $14,549 monster with a 16-inch screen, 128GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage—they are available for preorder now and go on sale November 6.

Their arrival marks the end of a lengthy era during which Apple executives regularly dismissed the idea of touchscreen Macs, even as it grew increasingly apparent that they were working on them. After years of speculation, we finally know how the company envisions touch changing the Mac experience. And the answer is: not all that much.

Along with introducing touch input, these are the first Macs with OLED screens.

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