Key Highlights

  • Apple holds a Los Angeles event Wednesday, with its first touchscreen MacBook Pro reported as the headline product.
  • The event follows the folding iPhone Duo in September and a smart home hub in New York this month.
  • Reports say the touchscreen models keep M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, while a base M6 MacBook Pro arrived this week.
  • Mac sales rose 28.7% to USD 10.35 billion in the June quarter, much of the growth from enthusiasts and businesses.

A Reversal in Los Angeles

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) holds a product event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, with reports pointing to its first touchscreen MacBooks. The launch departs from a long-held aversion to touch on laptops and caps a burst of product releases ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.

Billed as "Pro and Tell", the gathering is a press and creator experience that starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, with product details arriving through press releases.

What Reports Describe

Reports describe 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with touch-enabled OLED displays. Touch is positioned as an additional input alongside the keyboard and trackpad. The machines keep the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips already found in current MacBook Pro models, so they gain no significant performance boost over existing ones.

Apple announced a separate product on Tuesday: an upgraded base MacBook Pro with a new M6 chip.

A Run of Launches

Apple launched its folding iPhone, the iPhone Duo, at its Silicon Valley headquarters in September, then introduced a smart home hub in New York earlier this month. John Ternus took over as CEO on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook, who became executive chairman.

Those products test new markets for Apple. The Los Angeles event instead revives an old question: whether touchscreens that Apple made mainstream in iPhones and iPads belong in its oldest product line.

Decades of Resistance

Apple executives long resisted the idea. Co-founder Steve Jobs said in 2010 that touchscreens on laptops were ergonomically poor, and Cook likened such a device in 2012 to combining a toaster and a refrigerator. Before becoming CEO, Ternus argued that Apple already makes a touchscreen computer in its iPad lineup.

Touchscreens have been widely available on Windows devices for more than a decade, and the iPhone nears its two-decade anniversary, so a new generation of buyers expects screens to respond to touch. An analyst at a research firm said Apple was always wrong to resist touch and described the shift as reality catching up, adding that some changes are inevitable.

Customer Response and Mac Sales

A key question for Apple is how customers respond. Mac sales have risen, with much of the growth among technology enthusiasts and businesses buying machines for on-device AI tasks. In the fiscal third quarter ended June 27, Mac net sales rose 28.7% to USD 10.35 billion.

A prominent tech commentator and podcast host wrote on X that buyers mainly want more memory and better processors for running local models.

Markers to Follow

The models, chips and prices Apple confirms, availability dates, and the response from buyers frame the next phase.