Hello! Please excuse the tardiness, but Apple just announced its first touchscreen MacBook, and after years of asking Apple executives when this would happen, I had to get you my take ASAP. That’s below.
Plus, Instagram’s long-form video play, Apple’s iPhone Duo Crackgate, Anthropic’s IPO and America’s laptop. And a LOLz Thing that brings back your favorite viral characters from the early 2010s.
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The huge news: The MacBook Pro is getting a touchscreen. The not-so-huge news: The MacBook Pro is getting a touchscreen.
On Wednesday, at a fancy event in a Hollywood studio—which I did not attend but instead covered from my equally fancy New Jersey studio in sweatpants—Apple unveiled the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. Woof, what a name.
This laptop has all the makings of a powerful MacBook Pro, as it should for its nearly $3,000 starting price. There is a crazy new 14- or 16-inch OLED screen, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, a thinner and lighter design, an iPhone-like Dynamic Island and, yes, the glowing Apple logo on the lid is back!
But the part I want to focus on is the touchscreen. Because, well, let's review history:
Steve Jobs in 2010: “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical,” he said, arguing that after a short period of reaching up to touch a screen, “your arm wants to fall off.” He called the experience “ergonomically terrible.”
Tim Cook in 2012: “You could converge a toaster and a refrigerator, sure you could do that…but you wind up not building the best product in this particular case when you try to converge those [a tablet and a laptop].”
Despite pronouncements like these, I have personally spent a disturbing amount of my professional life asking Apple executives when they’re going to put a touchscreen on a Mac.
In 2021, I asked a guy named John Ternus, then Apple’s senior VP of hardware engineering, about touchscreen Macs, and he took the same line: “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad. 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.”
In 2022, I asked Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, if Apple would consider it. He at least didn’t rule it out: “Who’s to say?” he told me. In June 2025, I asked him again whether Apple had a touchscreen Mac hiding somewhere in its buildings. That time he just laughed.
Well, who’s laughing now, Craig? Actually, probably Craig. He knew this was coming.
For anyone hoping Apple would offer some grand philosophical explanation for why a touchscreen suddenly belongs on a Mac today but absolutely, categorically didn’t for the past 15 years, well, that didn’t happen.
And maybe that’s the point. This feels less like some monumental shift in Apple’s thinking than the company simply deciding the idea is actually...fine. Useful, even, for some! Something it probably should have done years ago, especially when Windows laptops have had touchscreens for more than a decade. Here’s what I think Apple is doing here…
Fun fact: Not all tickers are as obvious as “ANT.” Some are single letter, like F for Ford and T for AT&T, dating back to the days of stock ticker machines, when the most busily traded stocks got one-letter names to save time. Other companies had fun with theirs; Southwest Airlines is LUV, and Steinway Piano is LVB, named after Ludwig van Beethoven. The list of fun ones goes on.
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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