Touchscreen laptops have long been common on the Windows side of the industry, but Apple has only now announced its first MacBook with a touch display. The company does not appear to be overhauling macOS to suit the new hardware, however. Based on what Apple has described, most of the touch-focused work will happen inside apps.
The most notable system-level change is the arrival of the Dynamic Island, a feature known from iOS, on the new MacBook Pro. Apple says the added touch controls will be especially handy for tasks such as accepting AirDrops and pausing music playback directly from the interface.
Beyond that, the touch gestures Apple has outlined are fairly predictable. Users will be able to pinch to zoom in on photos, drag and drop slides between two different presentations, and swipe to scroll through web pages. Double tapping a window will make it full screen, just as a double click does, and dragging a window corner will resize it.
Apple's own apps will already be optimized for touch, and the system will automatically translate touches into clicks. The company also named several third-party apps that will take advantage of the new controls: Notion, Canva, Zoom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve.
Bringing multitouch to some of these professional creative tools could prove interesting. Still, for the most part, touch looks set to serve as a secondary input method rather than a new way of interacting with the whole system.
The MacBook Pro is the latest in a busy year of hardware launches for Apple. The company recently introduced its first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, with preorders backed up into 2027. Earlier this fall it also released the HomeView, its first display built for the smart home.
Software has been just as eventful. The Apple Watch is about to move into wearable surveillance, Siri has improved noticeably, and macOS gained an easy win by toning down the Liquid Glass effect. Adding a touchscreen MacBook and a touch-aware macOS fits the pattern, and the Ternus era has gotten off to a fast start.
