Apple is expected to unveil a revamped MacBook Pro with a touchscreen display at an event in Los Angeles, a move that would mark the first time a Mac has featured a touchscreen. The launch, covered in a live blog by The Verge, comes after a busy week for the company.
The MacBook Pro has looked largely the same for several years and has never had a proper touchscreen. Apple's executives have for a long time criticised touchscreen laptops, arguing in effect that touch input belongs on the iPad rather than the Mac. That stance makes the expected change notable. The Verge notes that the company has instead relied on the Touch Bar, a narrow strip above the keyboard, which was never a full touchscreen and has been widely seen as a limited experiment.
The event follows a week of smaller announcements from Apple. On Monday the company introduced a new iPad Mini with an upgraded OLED display. On Tuesday it released M6 chip upgrades for the MacBook Pro and the iMac. Those Mac updates were iterative refreshes that closely resembled their direct predecessors, which makes the Los Angeles event stand out by comparison. The Verge describes the Macs as the definition of quiet, incremental updates, while the touchscreen model is expected to be a considerably bigger change.
Apple has published its own announcement of a new 14-inch MacBook Pro powered by the M6 chip. Bloomberg has reported that buyers may be asked to pay more for a touchscreen model, with a likely price of around $2,899 for the laptop, according to its reporting. Those details come from pre-event coverage and had not been confirmed by Apple at the time of writing, so pricing and feature specifics should be read as subject to the company's official confirmation. Bloomberg's headline frames the question as whether buyers will accept paying more for touch, a point that will shape how the product is received.
Whether the touchscreen will change how people use the laptop remains to be seen. A touchscreen MacBook Pro would mark a clear shift in Apple's long-held position on touch input for its computers, and the announcement is likely to be closely watched by buyers, developers and rival laptop makers alike. Coverage of the event will continue as Apple presents the product and its specifications.