Mark Gurman, reporting mid-October for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to finally launch a touch-screen version of its Mac computer, reversing course on a stance that dates back to co-founder Steve Jobs.

The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new machines, code-named K114 and K116, will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips.

In making the move, Apple is following the rest of the computing industry, which embraced touch-screen laptops more than a decade ago. The company has taken years to formulate its approach to the market, aiming to improve on current designs…

The new laptops will feature displays with OLED technology — short for organic light-emitting diode — the same standard used in iPhones and iPad Pros, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. It will mark the first time that this higher-end, thinner system is used in a Mac.

And from his Power On newsletter Sunday:

I previously wrote about the first one: a revamped M6 Pro and M6 Max MacBook Pro with an OLED display, thinner chassis, and touch support. That’s slated to arrive between late 2026 and early 2027.

I’ll get the good news out of the way first: organic-LED displays coming to the Mac lineup (hopefully) next year is such great news. The mini-LED displays Apple has used since the 2021 MacBooks Pro were borrowed from the 2021 iPad Pro and were, back then, the best display technology Apple offered. OLED screens only shipped in small iPhones, and Apple’s highest-end display, the Pro Display XDR, used mini-LED too. Whereas traditional LED displays use a single backlight to illuminate the pixels, mini-LED screens use dozens of dimming zones to control smaller parts of the display separately. This results in deeper blacks, high dynamic range support, and better contrast, similar to OLED. However, OLED displays illuminate each pixel individually, enabling more precise light control and even better HDR. Think of mini-LED as a stopgap solution between LED and OLED.

The biggest problem with OLED displays is brightness. Because each pixel must be individually lit, it is quite difficult to engineer an OLED with equal brightness to the single-backlight LED as displays get larger. For Apple to make HDR monitors beginning in 2019, it had to use mini-LED because the technology to make large screens bright enough just wasn’t there. My high-end LG OLED television I bought in 2023 only has a maximum sustained brightness of around 150 nits when the whole screen is used. (Its peak brightness is much higher at 850 nits, making it suitable for HDR content.) By contrast, my MacBook Pro’s display reaches up to 1600 nits, making it readable in direct sunlight. The larger the display, the more difficult it is to use OLED and maintain brightness.

Apple solved this issue last year with its introduction of the M4 iPad Pro, using a display technology it calls “tandem OLED,” essentially two OLED displays stacked atop each other. This doubles the brightness and maintains all of the perks of OLED, and even remains much thinner than the original mini-LED design. This was an extremely complex technology to engineer — LG, Apple’s OLED display supplier, had been working on it for years — and therefore, only arrived on the highest-end iPad Pro models (which received a price increase). For Apple to transition away from mini-LED, it would have to implement a tandem OLED panel in the MacBook Pro, which would be enormously challenging and expensive. The processor would also have to be capable of running both panels simultaneously — this was why the 2024 iPad Pro used the M4 chip, skipping over the M3.

However Apple plans to do this, I’m incredibly excited, and will gladly pay a premium for an OLED MacBook Pro. Selfishly, I hope these models launch in late 2026, because I planned to update my current M3 Max MacBook Pro this year until Apple delayed them to January 2026.

On to the disappointing news: Who wants a touchscreen? Probably quite a few Mac laptop buyers, but I’m dismayed by this rumor. Irrespective of Apple’s modern reasons for omitting touchscreens from Mac laptops — it doesn’t want to eclipse iPad sales — I don’t think Mac computers are designed for touchscreens. macOS is historically built around Macs’ excellent, class-leading trackpads, with smooth scrolling, gestures, and intuitive controls. iOS is designed for touchscreens — macOS is not. I would even say Windows isn’t, either, because every time I’ve used a Windows laptop with a touchscreen I’ve wanted to defenestrate the thing, but Windows laptops’ trackpads are so abysmally poor that I understand why most people use them. Windows is not in any way comparable to macOS; macOS is an intentionally designed operating system, for one.

The desktop web is not designed for touch input. (And the mobile web, even in 2025, is also horrible. Have you tried booking a flight on a smartphone?) Touch targets are tiny, there are floating toolbars, and the experience is sub-par. The cursor is the only proper way to interact with a desktop OS, and macOS is designed perfectly around the trackpad. The only reason Apple would ever consider adding touchscreens to Mac laptops is pure advertising. “Look, we have touchscreens too! Buy a Mac!” Pathetic revisionist reasoning. There’s a reason Steve Jobs said touchscreens don’t belong on Macs: it’s just a poor user experience in every dimension.

I implore those who, unlike me, are fine with smudges on their laptop displays to try tapping some buttons in macOS with their finger. Nobody can convince me that it is a natural gesture. When I use my computer, I keep my left hand on the left side of the keyboard, and I use my right to control the mouse or trackpad. The left hand switches between windows using Command-Tab and handles keyboard shortcuts like Command-W, while the left selects items using the cursor. This is the most efficient way to use a computer, and macOS has always encouraged users to train themselves this way. Every well-designed Mac app supports the same gestures and keyboard shortcuts. They work anywhere in the system. Spotlight makes getting to apps and files easy — Windows has nothing like that, let alone a Command-Space keyboard shortcut.

I am not old. I only vaguely remember a time before touchscreens because I was a child then. I appreciate my iPad and I adore my iPhone because touchscreens make those devices magical and easy to use. But would anyone create a touchscreen TV? Of course not, because that would be preposterous. The remote control was invented for a reason, and so was the cursor. The mouse cursor is not a vestige of the past, but is a common-sense method of computing. The internet is designed around the cursor and the keyboard, and lifting your hands up from the keyboard position just doesn’t make any sense. I truly hope and believe Apple will include an option on these new laptops to disable the touchscreen.