Former Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs once said that if you spent enough time reaching up to touch a laptop screen, your arm would want to fall off.

For more than a decade, that idea shaped the Mac. Windows laptop makers pushed touchscreens for years while Apple stayed away, and the MacBook stayed a sit-down machine built around a keyboard and a trackpad.

Apple Kept Its Hands Off the Screen for 16 Years

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” Jobs said at the company’s “Back to the Mac” event in 2010. “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,” Jobs continued. “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”

Jobs waved off a demo of someone reaching up to tap a laptop screen and argued that multitouch belonged on horizontal surfaces like trackpads and mice.

The position stuck for years. “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad,” Apple CEO John Ternus, then the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, told the Wall Street Journal in 2021.

Apple Is Betting on a Lighter Touch

Now the company is set to do the thing Jobs warned about. Bloomberg reported Apple plans to introduce its first touchscreen MacBook Pros on Oct. 27 or 28, with sales starting as soon as Nov. 6. Apple has not confirmed the products or the dates.

According to Bloomberg the touchscreens are coming to redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch models, and that touch is meant to sit alongside the keyboard and trackpad rather than turn the laptop into a tablet. According to Gurman, the new MacBook Pros are expected to bring:

• Organic light-emitting diode screens like the ones in recent iPad Pros, with brighter highlights, richer color and deeper blacks
• A smaller Dynamic Island cutout like the iPhone’s in place of the notch
• A lighter body with a reinforced hinge so the screen doesn’t wobble when you tap it
• M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the same processors in current MacBook Pros

That is a different pitch than the one Jobs was shooting down. He was talking about touch as the main way to use a big vertical screen. Gurman’s description treats it as an occasional gesture for tapping a button, scrolling or adjusting a control while the keyboard and trackpad stay in charge.

The software points the same way. Early macOS 27 betas include pull-to-refresh, touch support in Sidecar, larger finger-friendly controls and menus that appear around a fingertip. If those touch-friendly elements only show up when a finger is detected, that could limit the arm fatigue Jobs predicted. A sturdier hinge and a generation of people used to touching phones and tablets also change things since 2010.

Even the Apple Stores Are Getting a Makeover

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman said on Bloomberg’s “Power On with Mark Gurman” podcast that Apple’s retail stores have a big floor reset scheduled for the evening of Nov. 5 into Nov. 6. He reported the resets tend to happen about a week after Apple introduces new products.

Whether the new machines feel natural or bring back the arm fatigue Jobs predicted won’t be clear until people can use them. For now, the company that once called a touchscreen MacBook “ergonomically terrible” looks ready to build one anyway.

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