Nice, but they're merely fixing a regression ;) Now if they could do the same with the iPhone instead of introducing more Bricky McBrick editions…

2019, 13" MacBook only weighed 3.02 lbs

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111945

Definitely appreciated. The increased weight is the one downside of my M1 laptop over my earlier 2015 Macbook.

Sounds like maybe the Macbook Air could become the original 12 inch Macbook(2015) weight eventually. They might even re-introduce a 12 inch model. Imagine that!

The best thing about OLED is not having disgusting amounts of blooming[0] and purple-pink edge fraying.

It's so bad that the first time I used my M series I thought I needed to RMA it because the display must be broken it it looks this bad, right? Nope.

[0]https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m0zq6aEnGWs/sddefault.jpg

They might have changed the internal fan layout. If you look it AR mode, you can look underneath the display , there’s usually two fan exhausts there, this one has only one

But I also only have an m1 16” so it may not be a brand new change

13-inch M1 MacBook Air: 2.8 pounds (1.29 kg)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111883

To put in a perspective it’s the weight of a new iPhone duo.

Back to similar weight as the 2016 Touch Bar era MBPs (13" 1.37 kg; 15" 1.83 kg), except way better thermals and battery life.

TBH this is one of the things that will be a clear downgrade imo. Weight reductions are thinness are not free. The Pro and Max chip version are already over powered for the cooling system the current macbook pros have. And now they are further cutting into the laptop...

It looks like it went from a 100 Wh battery to 72.6 Wh battery. That will definitely reduce the weight.

Edit: I was incorrect, I thought I had clicked the 16" spec page but had not. The 16" MacBook is still at 100 Wh.

Welcome to 2016. Lightweight OLED displays have been in the market since a decade ago, but now we are praising Apple for catching up 10 years later for a laptop with a "pro" moniker? Damn, the Apple ass-kissing here never disappoints.

I can’t be the only one who recoils in horror at the thought of TOUCHING THE SCREEN! It’s like going to the toilet and not washing your hands after. I’m sure people do it, but..ew.

Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.

No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.

Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.

I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a couple of years ago for my linux laptop and had been using it for months before I realized when I was wiping a smudge off of the monitor that it was a touch display! It was quite the surprise. I have yet to find it of any value.

The Thinkpad I got years ago accidentally came with a touchscreen (I looked for other specs and totally missed that part). I've never used it.

In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.

I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.

I'm not the target for this particular product either and you and I use our MBPs in pretty much identical ways. I will say though, if the laptop's hinge allowed reverse clamshell like the Yoga, then I would consider the premium for a feature I would rarely use. I like the idea of a tablet, but any time I'm seated with one, I'm either doing something I'd do on my phone or doing something that I'd rather be doing on my computer running a desktop OS.

Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!

Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.

But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.

My work laptop has a touchscreen. I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.

It's expectation. Think of all the screens in your life that you interact with and when you can't touch them it feels broken (at least to me). So I don't use my laptop as a tablet but when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button. Or I'm helping someone with a task and reaching to move a window directly is natural.

So it is just table stakes at this point.

For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.

I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.

Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.

I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.

Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.

I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.

To be honest, I'm more often than not more concerned about not having smudges on my laptop's screen.

I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.

Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.

As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.

As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.

Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)

Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.

Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).

Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.

It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.

> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops

My retired parents. When they borrow my laptop, I see them trying to touch my regular non-touch screen.

> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.

Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.

So this device would not be for me either.

I have a surface pro 4 and absolutely like touch. The combination of an actual keyboard and touch is very efficient.

I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.

It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so deired.

I actually disable touch screen in bios on my Dell XPS13 because I don't like touching it accidentally but then I'm not the target market for a touchscreen laptop.

I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.

I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.

I use it constantly. No one actually holds their hands up to the screen for extended periods of time. But touching the screen to click a button can be more efficient than tabbing or mousing to it. Especially if the laptop is on your lap.

Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.

It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.

However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed

Maybe this is the reason they doing it now

the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing

I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts

I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.

Sometimes tapping a button is easier or faster than grabbing my mouse and navigating over to it but it is pretty infrequent.

The only reason I would want touch is if the screen would fold and rotate in order to turn it into a tablet. If Apple made this in a 12-inch format (like their old 12-inch MacBook I'd buy it immediately.

No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!

It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.

I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).

A bit of a shame there is no M6 Pro and M6 Max...

It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.

A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.

I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.

I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.

I don’t have a dedicated tablet, and use a touchscreen laptop that’s “folded back” in lieu of that. It’s not as good but cheaper than two devices. To me it’s inherently a budget tool. An €3300 touchscreen laptop doesn’t really compute.

I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.

I have a touchscreen ThinkPad. As an instructor, I found it useful to draw on slides with the pen. I rarely touch it otherwise.

I mostly use MBPs now and resort to using my iPad as a mirrored screen to draw on slides. It is hacky.

I use the touch screen on my Panasonic Toughbook: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...

I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.

Only use case I can think of is using the iPhone simulator right from the Mac’s screen instead of having to send to iPhone

I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.

I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)

> Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops?

Sometimes I use it in Linux. Sometimes it makes my system freeze, requiring a hard restart. Perhaps it would be wise to disable it in BIOS.

I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.

I like some of the 2-in-1 devices that come with a pen - Surface Pro type devices or ones with a 360 degree hinge.

But with a conventional laptop I've only ever accidentally used the touch screen.

Always have and always will love having a touchscreen on a laptop.

At this point it's a huge loss to not have it on a display. Don't like it? Then shut up and don't use it. Don't yuck others' yum.

It's great for convertibles, but less useful for regular laptops. One great use case is mobile app development, though.

I hate it. It's beyond me why people would intentionally smudge their laptop display.

I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).

Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.

Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:

> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”

> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.

I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/steve-jobs-said-a-touchs...

My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.

I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.

All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.

I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.

When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.

I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.

While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.

If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.

I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.

It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.

I always look for a way to disable it

These comments are LLM-tier now, if not LLM-generated already.

"""

Does anyone actually use <the new feature>?

I personally prefer <the status quo> and don't think I ever have a need for <the new feature>.

Also, I don't like <some drawback that comes with adopting the new feature>.

But that's just me, I'm a simple guy. Like and subscribe!

"""

Exactly what i was thinking, with these decision they are making a quick bucks but in the long term apple will just be another washed and forgetful brand like most of the windows brand, and then what reason to get a macbook ?

They worked so hard to "think different", get a following with people that would willingly spend more for a product inferior technically because it was just bold.

i am the first one to appreciate the direction apple is taking, as a customer it will bring even more competition to the windows laptop market because everything will be similar, but when i put my self in steve jobs shoe, i want to puke.

I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.

I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.

I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.

Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.

I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.

I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.

Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.

There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:

iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.

That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.

It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.

The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.

Much like the Touch Bar, I expect that Apple will learn this lesson the hard way.

You are an outliner. Touch is standard across every device. To not have it just feels like a deduction.

Even now, I find myself resisting the urge to tap things on my Macbook display as it is.

The world moved on. Touch is standard, and Steve Jobs was incredibly wrong with his weird opinions.

This is like people arguing that a computer mouse is not necessary in 1990.

You’re not an outlier.

I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).

Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.

Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)

I mean it's only $400 more than the LED non-touch screen.

Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators.

5 trillion market cap. That's how much of an outlier (i.e. clueless) you are.

The hands are also almost in the exact same image Steve Jobs had on a slide during the iPad keynote showing touch on a laptop is not ergonomic. It's poetic, almost.

Yeah, piano playing was a bad example. There’s a reason MIDI keyboard manufacturers try so hard to replicate the weighted feel of a real piano. Your fingers need feedback.

Their demo is also mobile app development using touchscreen for testing apps in the simulator.

As a longtime laptop musician, using the QWERTY keyboard to play notes in the absence of a MIDI controller is infinitely preferable to this goofy demo.

Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.

I agree that a piano demo seems like a bad idea. But damn if I don’t daily long for the iOS 6 days where buttons and tappable areas were well defined and there were some fun and whimsy to the interface. As compared to the flat unintuitive desolate landscape of recent years. I would rather have a big animated cassette deck in my music player than the current overly polished full page advert I get every time I open the app. At least Forstall and his team cared enough.

Reminiscent of the DJ who performed a DJ set on the TouchBar...

Yes it is. I mean, you’re not going to play Chopin on it, obviously. But for selecting notes into a DAW? Hella convenient.

Repliers: stop pretending you make music. You don’t and it shows. Producers are going to love this.

"Touch screens don't want to be vertical" "After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off" "ergonomically terrible"

- Steve Jobs

Apple: check our new vertical touchscreen!

I wish I hadn't read this comment, because now I really feel like a 360 hinge is sorely lacking.

My wife sits on the couch, "indian style", with a laptop in her lap angled at about a 45 degree. She holds the edges of it with her arms, and brings the keyboard up to her stomach kinda...

Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly

Macbook hinges always get loose with time too

How do you think webapps work today? Is macOS UX actually well thought out to begin with? (no)

It's a nonissue when you look at the state of macOS attention to detail nowadays, regardless of which side of the fence you're on.

I can actually see a possibility where this improves UI/UX a bit. One being the removal of some many hover-over UI elements, e.g., the (x) button on notifications do not display unless a mouse is hovering over the notification badge.

So, it may makes things a little easier for some GUI scripting. I can also see the UX improving for some disabilities, but I know that is merely coincidental rather than intentional.

Windows did this seemingly by not caring that it's also a touch screen, so not everything in the system is touch-friendly. It's still fine for many situations.

But they have already done it. The updates are already in macOS and they have not negatively affected the UX.

Most Windows laptops have had touch for a very long time now.

Those changes are already in the latest macOS. So feel free to share your opinion on what we’ve already been using instead of speculating.

Does that mean you also believe the same to be true for mouse affordances ruining it for keyboard users and vice-versa? Or "touch" is special in this regard?

Not letting the screen bend back all the way neuters every avantage of touch. Touch interfaces are incredibly frustrating when the thing you are touching doesn't have enough resistance.

That's a good point, the use case for mobile app dev would be quite appealing even if a little niche.

Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).

For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.

Your assertion hasn’t been true for a while.

You have the MacBook Pro with three tiers of SoCs, each with binning options.

There was already an option for screen coatings and now an option for a new screen type.

That’s not to mention storage and RAM choices.

Its still the MacBook with HDR display and active cooling and more inputs. I’m not sure why options are an issue

It's been a while since Jobs' nice simple quad chart. I miss the elegance of that.

Where are they lacking?

Explain further what you mean. The displays are still best in class. What metrics do you have suggesting otherwise?

IMO getting a studio for LLMs is a wiser choice since it doesn't heat up and there are no batteries to degrade.

For an M5 max top bin with 128GB Ram:

- mac studio: $5,899.00 (with 2TB ssd bump to match the default macbook sku)

- macbook 16: $7,399.00

Portability gets a hit but I feel you can have a thin client and let the studio do the heavy lifting back at your home/studio(heh).

These are right at the edge of desirable for me right now -- but it's hard to pull the trigger. I'm imagining an M7 Pro with 480 GB/s and therefore an M7 Max 850-900 GB/s. And significantly better GPU speeds as well. If I knew I could get the M7 Max Q2 of next year, especially at 192GB of RAM, I'd wait.

But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..

Notably these chips came out back in March of this year. Today's changes are in the display and form factor but maintaining the same CPU, GPU, and memory specs.

Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.

What's are the odds that the M7 Max goes above 128GB? (Presuming the rumors about Apple skipping the M6 Pro/Max are true)

I like scratches on my machines, it gives them character.

I wish there was a red or green one. Sick of only having two options.

Life is too short

the champagne color for airs looks really nice when worn too, but i mirror your sentiments on black - it does not age well

Except there is no "paint". Neither are there any "black ones"; space grey isn't very close to black, and I've seen no wear issues of any kind on any of the Macs I support.

Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.

They’ve done it before: first retina model has the same cpu and GPU as the previous gen

"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."

probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.

replacing the notch with a hole punch isn't much of an improvement for me anyway. it still kills the top quarter inch of the display for non-letterboxed movies, games etc. I'm tempted to replace my Air with a Neo just to have a non-punctured screen.

Here's the official launch video, where it looks silly to me, but I know very casual users who love their touchscreen laptops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZI5uUSdEo

I could see it with tablet but reaching out to touch my laptop, or worse desktop, screen would get very tiring, very quickly.

I mean it seems like a good idea to me for mobile app development, being able to touchscreen the simulator.

I also assumed Apple had something up their sleeves that would make sense to everyone once shown.

Meanwhile they just added a touchscreen. No new hinge. No new UI. Not even a Pen support.

WTF are they doing?

Yeah, if you can turn off or ignore the touch part, there's a whopper of a weight savings, a better display panel, and improved thermal performance hiding in this package.

Would it not be just easier to connect actual iphone to the laptop for testing?

$4950 for Max, Nano Texture 36GB/2TB - This is getting ridiculous.

Seriously. I paid 3400 for my M3 Max 128GB macbook in 2023. Sad times.

Here they offer no finance for over £5k. Crap.

Really glad I'm not currently shopping for a new computer.

It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.

One MacBook Air with a glowing Apple logo on the lid, please!

YES

They have had people asking them for touchscreen laptops for years. They legitimately lose sales to people who want a Mac but refuse to buy a laptop without a touch screen.

I think this is the wrong device to start with, though. The demand for touchscreens is probably highest in the cheapest lines. But presumably this will trickle down over the next few years.

You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.

Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.

Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.

I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.

If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.

I remember Steve Jobs saying something about how silly it would be.

I use Mac mostly, but I also use a Panasonic Toughbook (https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...) and it has a touch screen display and I find it's a useful addition to how I interact with it.

1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.

2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.

I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.

Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.

Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.

You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.

especially with the same lid angle. Look at the pictures, they didn't even know how people use touchscreen on the laptops, it's funny

If you've ever watched a kid try to use a MacBook, they instinctively touch the screen because they were raised on iPads.

Even when developing a mobile app and using the simulator, you never wished you could touchscreen the simulator?

I need a screen which zaps me whenever I touch it, to discouraged me from accidentally leaving fingerprints at the edge.

Yes, I agree, but I caught myself touching the screen twice this week forgetting it was a Mac...

when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.

Nope. Never had any desire for one.

It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.

> In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.

I have not experienced that at all. I see people touch their touch-capable laptop screens all the time.

I don’t understand how people legitimately hold this belief that no one could or would use a laptop touchscreen. This is exactly how millions of people use their tablets every day. You hold it in your lap and you poke the screen. Or you use the stand to prop it up on a table and you poke at the screen. And shockingly, your arm doesn’t fall off.

NFL announcers called the Surface tablets the teams were using "iPad-like devices": https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-nfl-surface-ipads-...

worth the $3k right here

Oh my god yes!!

Yes it is (as people already have discussed in this thread). A link to the keynote where Steve Jobs talk about it: https://youtu.be/7zfir0Ide0A?si=fKF68UUoLhXK8cPJ

Admittedly, Apple has “refused” to do many things over the years (pen support on iPad comes to mind) and yet ends up doing them. Apple refuses to do something until they want to sell it. FWIW, I don’t understand the appeal of this device at all, but I don’t expect much consistency from Apple.

FWIW, it forces them to have a more sturdy and touch resistant screen. They demoed the piano app, and it means a minimum of impact resistance.

Windows laptop took the same path, for the better.

> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different

Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.

Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.

I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.

> In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.

Glad I'm not alone. Unfortunately every week I have to clean it from dust and also smudges that gets passed from the keyboard when you close the lid.

You act like you don't use a touch screen every day. Its not some crazy impossible technology to have an oleophobic display.

I liked the Touch Bar for custom app actions, but I didn’t like that it replaced the physical keys. Not that I use any of them much besides volume.

CPU + battery in the top-cover kills the balance of the laptop and makes the whole thing heavier. It's a really awkward design compared to a clamshell laptop with a very thin display-only lid.

Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.

I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.

MacBook No

MacBook Ice

He has been CEO for all of five minutes. These products have been in development much longer.

Wait for real.. for real! https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/28/illuminated-logo-return...

I was gonna get it for the oled (also don’t care about touch screen) but now it’s also for the glowing logo!

Has been for a whole. Don't get a Pixel 11 though or wait for the new Motorola flagship.

"Up to 2 more hours than an M1 Macbook Pro" sounds less impressive.

I expect there’s still a lot of people that haven’t upgraded yet.