Well, it took long enough. The rumor mill is buzzing again and this time it's about something I've been waiting on since, oh, 2012 or so. Apple is reportedly working on a touchscreen MacBook Pro, and it could launch as early as 2027 with a special OLED display built by Samsung.

According to Geeky Gadgets, the display would be exclusive to the so-called MacBook Ultra, which sounds like it'll sit at the very top of Apple's laptop lineup. Samsung is apparently supplying the panels. That tracks, since Samsung Display already makes OLED screens for Apple products. None of this is confirmed yet so take it with the usual grain of salt.

I find this both thrilling and a little funny. For years Apple insisted that touchscreens on laptops were a terrible idea. The company spent over a decade steering people toward the iPad if they wanted touch input on a portable device. And meanwhile every Windows laptop maker on the planet kept shipping touchscreen models anyway, and people kept buying them.

I remember when the first touchscreen Chromebooks started showing up at prices that made sense. My granddaughter Jess spent an entire afternoon flipping one around and tapping on it like a tablet. She was maybe ten at the time. Even then I thought, the kids are going to expect this on everything eventually.

Apple eventually softened its stance. The newer iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard blurs the line between tablet and laptop, even though it's still very much a tablet experience running iPadOS rather than macOS. The overlap between what people do on an iPad and what they do on a MacBook keeps shrinking too. So a touchscreen MacBook feels less like a shocking reversal and more like Apple quietly admitting what the rest of us figured out a decade ago.

The OLED part is what interests me most. OLED on a laptop display gives you those deep blacks and rich colors. We've already seen how gorgeous OLED looks on Apple's iPad Pro, though that device uses a tandem OLED setup and the MacBook panels from Samsung may be a different technology entirely. Pairing OLED with touch input on a larger screen sounds like a genuinely appealing combination. My only concern is battery life. OLED panels can be power-hungry and a laptop needs to last through a full workday. If anyone can engineer their way around that it's Apple, but I'll believe it when I see the real-world numbers.

2027 sounds far away but it really isn't. I'd guess that if Apple is already talking to display suppliers the design work is probably well underway, though that's just my own inference from how these product cycles usually go. I suspect we'll start seeing more detailed leaks by late next year, but again that's just me speculating.

And yes, before you ask, I will absolutely be first in line to try one. I've been watching personal computing evolve since I sat in front of the original Macintosh in 1984, when a mouse and a graphical interface felt like pure magic. Back then, touching a screen to make something happen still felt like science fiction. The future just took a little longer to arrive than I expected.