Apple has introduced its first MacBook with a touchscreen, bringing touch input to the Mac for the first time. The announcement came at Apple's "Pro and tell" event, where the company also outlined the limited set of changes macOS will receive for touch. Most of the touch interaction will take place inside individual apps rather than across the system as a whole.
Among the biggest macOS changes is the arrival of the Dynamic Island, making its debut on the MacBook Pro. Apple says the added touch controls are particularly useful for interacting with the interface to accept AirDrops and pause music playback. Beyond that, Apple described a set of largely predictable touch behaviors.
Trackpad gestures carry over to the display, including swiping from the right edge to show the notification center. The system magnifies drop-down menu options and the traffic light window controls when tapped, creating larger targets. Users can also pinch and zoom in on photos, drag and drop slides between two presentations, and swipe to scroll through webpages. Double tapping makes a window full screen the way a double click does, and dragging the corner of a window resizes it.
The more notable possibilities likely lie in individual apps. Apple's own apps are already optimized for touch, and the system automatically translates touches into clicks. Apple also named a group of third-party apps that will take advantage of the new touch controls: Notion, Canva, Zoom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Lightroom, and DaVinci Resolve. For those pro creator apps, multitouch is a possibility, though touch appears to function mostly as a secondary input method rather than a new way of interacting with the entire system.
Touchscreen laptops are already common in the Windows world, but Apple had not shipped one until now. The touchscreen MacBook Pro adds to a year of hardware moves from Apple: the company recently launched its first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, with preorders backed up into 2027, and earlier this fall it launched the HomeView, its first smart home display. Apple's software year has included the Apple Watch moving into wearable surveillance, Siri improving, and macOS dialing down the Liquid Glass effect. Apple published the announcement on October 28, 2026, and later added more details about interacting with window resizing controls and drop-down menus.
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