Why don’t Macs have a touchscreen?

MacBooks have become the computer of choice for those looking for productive laptops for content creation and everyday work at home and in the office. There are few laptops lighter than a MacBook Air, and even fewer computers more powerful than the MacBook Pro for productivity tasks. However, even though Apple dominates the market, MacBooks are still missing an important feature in 2026: touchscreens.

It doesn’t make much sense to miss out on a feature that most of your competitors are building into their devices, so why is Apple so insistent that MacBooks don’t have touch capabilities? It’s not like Apple is lacking in technology: the iPad Pro M5 is already powerful enough to function as your primary computer.

Apple hasn’t made any statements on the matter in recent years, but we have an idea of ​​what might have been the reasoning from an earnings call with Tim Cook in 2012. Cook likened the idea of ​​a unified operating system for tablets and touch-based computers to the convergence of “a toaster with a refrigerator,” further adding that even if it were possible, it would be unpleasant for the user.

Additional context to Cook’s statement can be found in a statement made by Steve Jobs in 2010 regarding touchscreen laptops, in which the former Apple CEO said: “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work.” Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. Jobs later expanded on this point, explaining how reaching to reach a laptop screen can easily become tiring and that it’s “terrible ergonomically.”

Apple may have been wrong about touchscreens not working on laptops – given how many high-end laptops now come with touchscreens – but the reasoning behind it wasn’t entirely incorrect. If you were to use a touchscreen as your primary method of navigation on a laptop sitting on a desk in front of you, it would cause incredible pain in your arm. However, high-end laptops today are much thinner and lighter, meaning you can easily use them on your lap. Additionally, you don’t use the touchscreen as your primary means of interacting with your computer; you use the touch features – tap the screen, pinch to zoom – on top of the existing touchpad.

Many computers these days can also fold or detach their keyboards to function as tablets, removing the distance that makes vertical touchscreens completely boring. With 2-in-1 convertibles and high-end ultraportable laptops featuring touch capabilities for a long time, Apple may want to rethink the idea that touchscreens don’t work on laptops.

Apple has more than a decade of experience marketing MacBooks without a touchscreen, even when it became normal for other manufacturers to do so, but it looks like that’s about to change. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo – both of whom have an incredibly good track record when it comes to Apple leaks – a touchscreen MacBook Pro is expected to arrive in early 2027.

Few details are yet known. But based on the leaked information, the touchscreen MacBook Pro is expected to feature an OLED display, something Apple has never used in MacBooks before. It was also said that the software engineering team behind the MacBooks was tweaking macOS to better accommodate and use a touchscreen. For example, Gurman reports that a new touch menu will appear when you tap an item with certain touch controls.

We still don’t know if the changes will affect the base MacBook or the MacBook Air – or the MacBook Neo for that matter – but the chances seem incredibly low, at least in the immediate future. There is also speculation that this touchscreen OLED MacBook will be a step up from the MacBook Pro and, as such, could be named and priced differently. Of course, we will have to wait for confirmation from Apple to be sure.