Apple won't let go of the idea of a touchscreen MacBook Pro

Despite continually saying a touchscreen MacBook Pro is a bad idea, newly-revealed research shows Apple hasn't stopped exploring the idea.

Despite widespread excitement when there is even a hint of a touchscreen Mac, Apple's position has famously and consistently been that there will never be one. Specifically, the Mac and the touch-screen iPad are two different things, and we should all buy both of them.

"We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering said in 2018. "I don't think we've looked at any of the other guys to date and said, how fast can we get there?"

But five years later in 2021, Apple applied for a patent that included a touchscreen Mac, and then in 2023, it filed another one. That patent, "Touch Sensing Utilizing Integrated Micro Circuitry," has now been granted.

"An integrated touchscreen can include light emitting diodes or organic light emitting diodes (LEDs/OLEDs), display chiplets and touch chiplets disposed in a visible area of the integrated touch screen," says the patent. "For example... the integrated touchscreen can also include electrodes disposed in the visible area of the integrated touch screen."

Patents do always aim to be sufficiently specific as to be defensible in court, but also broad to cover as wide a range of applications as possible. It is possible, then, that Apple is really investigating any kind of touchscreen, intending it for any kind of device, if it even has a particular device in mind.

However, as well as an illustration showing a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, the text repeatedly refers to "an example personal computer that includes a trackpad and an integrated touch screen."

"Additionally it should be understood that although the disclosure herein primarily focuses on integrated touch screens," continues the patent, "some of the disclosure is also applicable to touch sensor panels without a corresponding display."

That's definitely Apple trying to cover all bases. And the majority of the patent's 51 pages and 15,000 words are concentrated on the specifics of making any touchscreen work.

In the patent, there are detailed explanations of how a screen can "include light emitting diodes or organic light emitting diodes (LEDs/OLEDs)." There are also discussions of "display chiplets and touch chiplets" to allow for touch-detection.

There's also a rare nod to pricing, with Apple even noting that "touch screens... are popular because of their ease and versatility of operation as well as their declining price."

Certainly something has stopped Apple putting a touchscreen into a MacBook Pro so far, but it's unlikely to be the cost.

This patent is credited to six inventors, including Christoph H. Krah, whose previous work includes touchscreens for the iPhone.