Apple has long opposed the idea of a MacBook with a touch screen, but that may soon change.
Sources tell Bloomberg that Apple engineers are working on a touch screen for the MacBook Pro and have a tentative launch of 2025. Speculation about the tech giant developing a computer with a touch screen dates back to 2010, when the company filed a patent for what was called the iMac Touch, according to Patently Apple.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dismissed rumors that same year, arguing that a touch screen laptop would not work. “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” he said, according to Insider. “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
Since then a number of competitors, including Microsoft and Dell, have not only entered the touch screen computer space, but also adopted the two-in-one laptop-tablet hybrid.
In 2021, the topic of a touch screen laptop was revisited with Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus, who believed the company didn’t need to entertain the idea due to the existence of the iPad.
“We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad,” Ternus said. “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.”
A subsequent remark from Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi seemed to suggest that the company’s resistance was waning:
