Rumors of a touchscreen MacBook Pro have been circulating for over three years, and they’ve always left customers full of questions. First among them: “What in the world would that user experience be like?” The apparent answer, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, is that it will be…kinda muddled? But certainly full of new possibilities! And yes, it sounds like it will be like an iPhone with a keyboard—OLED screen, Dynamic Island, and all. But only if you want that.
At any rate, Gurman’s anonymous sources do indeed say a touchscreen MacBook Pro is coming later this year. Just don’t expect it to be announced at the next big Apple event. It’s still technically a secret—for now—that will be announced in time for a late 2026 release.
Apparently, the display on this laptop will change everything—or maybe nothing. Per Bloomberg:
“Even with the new display, Apple won’t position the MacBook Pro as an iPad replacement — or describe its interface as a touch-first experience. Instead, the idea is to let customers use the touch input as much or as little as they’d like, and blend it with the familiar point-and-click approach.”
If Apple is really going to be this wishy-washy, that’s understandable. If you’ve ever worked with a touchscreen PC, you might have experienced it mainly as feature bloat. Articles abound on how to disable the touchscreen option entirely on Windows machines. Then again, some people (myself included) absolutely love the new possibilities in Windows with a touch display, and never plan to look back.
On MacBook Pros, the new Dynamic Island—a version of those shapeshifting pill shapes over the floating camera hole on certain iPhone screens—will reportedly be at the center-top of the screen. On an iPhone, your Dynamic Island becomes your unlock “button,” as well as an instinctive first place to direct your attention when you take your phone out. It can display time remaining on a timer, sports scores, flight info, and more.
Per Bloomberg, the relevant version of macOS will allow for iPhone-style zooming and scrolling, and there will be a new kind of popup menu for when the user taps a button. However, the basic look won’t change drastically from current MacBooks.
Interestingly, this change may partly explain why Apple held on so stubbornly to the unpopular Liquid Glass aesthetic, including on MacBooks, even after users threw endless tantrums about it. Gurman writes that Liquid Glass seeded small changes that will smooth the transition to a touchscreen MacBook Pro, including control center sliders that have been made friendlier to touch input, and “more padding” around certain notifications.
Read the full article here
