Apple (AAPL.US) ends Jobs' era “touch screen ban”! The first OLED MacBook Pro touchscreen notebook will go on sale on November 6th!

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Apple (AAPL.US) CEO John Ternus (John Ternus) officially launched the first MacBook laptop equipped with a touch screen in the company's history at a press conference held in Los Angeles on Wednesday, announcing that Apple has abandoned the “notebook does not use a touch screen” concept that has continued for more than ten years. This is also the end of an intensive new product campaign since the new CEO took office, pointing to the upcoming holiday shopping season.

First touchscreen MacBook Pro: OLED screen+return to illuminated logo

At the press conference for content creators and creative professionals, Tenus showcased the new MacBook Pro model equipped with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen, focusing on the improvements in contrast, clarity, and brightness of the new screen. He also announced that the Apple logo on the back of the laptop will use a light-emitting design again.

“Listen, we love the Mac, and it's what brought so many of us to Apple today. Macs have never been better, never been more powerful.” Tenus said at the meeting.

Apple also announced that pre-orders for the new MacBook Pro began on Wednesday and officially went on sale on November 6. Pricing: The 14-inch M5 Pro model starts at $2,899; the top version is the 16-inch M5 Max model, which starts at $4,799. Compared to the previous generation of non-touch screen models, the new 16-inch model also lost about 0.7 pounds (about 0.32 kg) in weight.

From “bad ergonomics” to “the general trend”

Apple executives have long resisted touch-screen notebooks: Jobs called notebook touchscreens “very bad in terms of ergonomics” in 2010; then-CEO Tim Cook even compared touch screen notebooks to “combining a toaster and refrigerator in one” in 2012. Before becoming CEO, Tenus himself argued that Apple's iPad product line itself was a touch screen computer.

But the market has long changed: touch screens have been popular on Windows devices for more than a decade, and with the iPhone almost 20 years since it was introduced, a new generation of consumers naturally expect all screens to respond to touch. Anshel Sag (Anshel Sag), an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, commented: “I think Apple was always wrong in refusing touch screens back then, but now it's just a long arm of reality that finally takes effect — some things are simply inevitable.”

Behind Product Blitz: The New CEO's Offensive and Market Questions

Since Tenus — a veteran of Apple's hardware business — took over as CEO at the beginning of last month, the pace of Apple's new product launches has accelerated markedly: the folding iPhone “DUO” was released at the Silicon Valley headquarters in September, and a smart home hub was released in New York at the beginning of this month. This Los Angeles press conference is the end of this round of product offensives. The above products will all test Apple's ability to develop new markets.

The key question in the market is consumer reaction. Apple's Mac sales have recently rebounded, but the increase is mainly from tech enthusiasts and enterprise customers who buy devices to run AI tasks locally. It is worth noting that although Apple also released a basic upgrade model of the MacBook Pro with the new M6 chip this week, according to Bloomberg, the new touchscreen models are equipped with existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which means that compared to the models currently on sale, the touchscreen version has not improved significantly in terms of performance. Well-known tech commentator and “All-In Podcast” host Jason Calacanis (Jason Calacanis) said bluntly on the X platform: “The only thing users want is more memory and a stronger processor to run the local AI model!”

By the close of Wednesday, Apple's stock price (AAPL) was reported at $343.83, a slight decrease of 0.94%.