Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) ends the Jobs-era "touchscreen ban"! First touchscreen laptop OLED MacBook Pro goes on sale November 6!

Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) CEO John Ternus officially unveiled the company's first MacBook laptop equipped with a touchscreen at a launch event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, declaring that Apple Inc. has abandoned its decade-long insistence that "laptops should not have touchscreens." This also marks the finale of a wave of new product launches since the new CEO took office, aimed squarely at the upcoming holiday shopping season. First Touchscreen MacBook Pro: OLED Screen + Return of the Glowing Logo At the event venue aimed at content creators and creative professionals, Ternus showcased the new MacBook Pro model featuring an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display, emphasizing the improvements in contrast, clarity, and brightness. He also announced that the Apple Inc. logo on the back of the laptop will once again feature a glowing design. "Listen, we love the Mac it's what brought so many of us to Apple Inc. today. The Mac has never been this good, never been this powerful," Ternus said at the event. Apple Inc. also announced that the new MacBook Pro opened for pre-order on Wednesday and will officially go on sale on November 6. On pricing: the 14-inch M5 Pro model starts at US$2,899; the top-end version is the 16-inch M5 Max model, starting at US$4,799. Compared with the previous generation of non-touchscreen models, the new 16-inch model is also about 0.7 pounds (approximately 0.32 kilograms) lighter. From "Terrible Ergonomics" to "An Irresistible Trend" Apple Inc. executives long resisted touchscreens on laptops: Steve Jobs said in 2010 that touchscreen laptops were "terrible ergonomically"; then-CEO Tim Cook in 2012 even likened touchscreen laptops to "combining a toaster and a refrigerator." And before becoming CEO, Ternus himself had argued that Apple Inc.'s iPad product line was itself a touchscreen computer. But the market had long since changed: touchscreens have been ubiquitous on Windows devices for over a decade, and with the iPhone approaching its twentieth anniversary, a new generation of consumers naturally expects every screen to respond to touch. Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag commented: "I think Apple Inc. was always wrong to reject touchscreens back then now it's just the long arm of reality finally taking effect. Some things are simply inevitable." Behind the Product Blitz: The New CEO's Offensive and the Market's Questions Since Ternus the Apple Inc. hardware veteran took over as CEO early last month, Apple Inc.'s pace of new product releases has noticeably accelerated: in September, it launched the foldable iPhone "DUO" at its Silicon Valley headquarters, and earlier this month it launched a smart home hub in New York. This Los Angeles event is the finale of this round of product launches, and all of the above products will test Apple Inc.'s ability to develop new markets. The key question for the market is consumer reaction. Apple Inc.'s Mac sales have recently rebounded somewhat, but the growth mainly comes from tech enthusiasts and enterprise customers buying devices to run AI tasks locally. Notably, although Apple Inc. also released this week an upgraded base model of the MacBook Pro equipped with the all-new M6 chip, according to Bloomberg, the new touchscreen models carry the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, meaning that compared with models currently on sale, the touchscreen versions offer no significant performance improvement. Well-known tech commentator and host of the "All-In Podcast" Jason Calacanis said bluntly on X: "The only thing users want is more memory and a stronger processor to run local AI models!" As of Wednesday's close, Apple Inc.'s stock (AAPL) was at US$343.83, down slightly by 0.94%.