Apple Planning 'MacBook Ultra' With Touchscreen and Higher Price

[jdawgnoonan]

Why would their screens be smudged if they don't touch it? And IF they touch it then they wanted/needed to enough to accept some smiudges.

Why be stuck buying an input device you do not intend to use? When I bought a high end Lenovo workstation that cost roughly what a Max level MBP costs I had a choice between a touch or non touch screen.

 

[rotvaldi]

Gurman is always wrong so it’s fine.

And people pays for his articles on Bloomberg can’t believe honestly pure smoke

 

[JohnC1959]

Why be stuck buying an input device you do not intend to use? When I bought a high end Lenovo workstation that cost roughly what a Max level MBP costs I had a choice between a touch or non touch screen.

I guess it depends what the incremental cost is and what percentage of the total price it is. My car came with a radio that I never use but I don't mind.

 

[Shustr]

OLED - BIG YES
TOUCHSCREEN - BIG NO

I hope touch will be optional.

 

[unQuestionable]

OH YES! I think if this had one more thunderbolt port and the hdmi doubled as an "in" or capture card, I'll buy

 

[FlyingTexan]

That would actually be a good compromise. Keep the MacBook Pros the way they are and introduce this as a MacBook Ultra. And it will make it easier to make it disappear again when Apple realizes that nobody needs OLED, a touchscreen or a thinner and lighter design.

Speak for yourself. Thinner or lighter is always welcomed here. I travel for a living. I'd even like the ability to go smaller back to 12". Let us chose our own options at this point.

Give me the Max CPU, even an ultra, 128GB memory, put one of these coolers on the cpu, keep it lighter and I'm 100% on board.

As far as I go though I couldn't care less about OLED. Yes it's great on other laptops because they needed it. There was such an image quality difference. The screens on macbooks are phenomenal. Don't care about it. We're entering into the AI age and these systems are starting to adapt fast. I'm running LLMs and I'm 44 (today actually) and a pilot yet I'm finding tons of uses.

 

[unQuestionable]

also, if they replaced the keyboard with individual little haptic buttons like the trackpad, that would be dope.

 

[darngooddesign]

Why when they can give you a usb c port instead which can support whatever you want?

Because internal card readers are more convenient, and there are already three usbc ports.

 

[darngooddesign]

Or they can go the gaming PC laptop route. Slightly thicker, very loud and very short battery life.

There are users willing to put up with this as proven by gaming laptops and workstation laptops.

Macs are not gaming laptops, so most people won’t put up with the size, weight, and noise of a gaming laptop; especially after the relief of leaving those things behind with the Intel days.

 

[Daniel L]

Give an M6 Pro (with vapor chamber) in an oled 15 in a chassis slightly bigger than the air and take my money

 

[CrzySxyCl]

Too many products, stop it.

Delete the movie and TV show business.

Delete iPad Air. Give iPad Pro SD Card. Reduce Apple Pencil count to one.

Rename iPhone 17 Pro to iPhone Ultra, make it 1 to 2 mm thicker and offer it in three sizes (5.7, 6.3, 6.9), add next generation battery chemistry and better speakers.

Rename iPhone 17 to iPhone and make it 1 mm thinner and add next gen battery chemistry and offer it in three sizes (5.7, 6.3, 6.9).

Delete all other iPhones, and drop sub naming: mini, plus, and Max and all numbering.

Keep Neo as-is.

Resize MBA from 13.6 and 15.3 to 13.0 and 14.5. Give MBA SD Card and HDMI and bring back the wedge.

Resize MBP from 14.2 and 16.2 to 14.5 and 16.5. Keep it as a thick boi and make it better and more powerful in every way. Forget about this alt M6 product, give MBP M6 as-is, give it OLED, vapour chamber, Face ID and an additional Thunderbolt 5 port in close to the current hardware form factor. Don’t make it thinner. Forgo touch.

Move Apple Watch to two products: Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra. Announce Made for Apple Watch band program any luxury fashion or major sports brand can join turning any Apple watch into their branded watch via internal watch band chip designed by Apple (NFC), that will download and reveal the branded watch face upon attachment of both straps—the first strap connected tells WatchOS to download the watch face in the background, attaching the second band throws up a pop-up for the user whereby you can approve the new watch face to take over your Apple Watch—“A Reebok ® watch face was detected, do you want to use it?”

Simultaneously release a high-end “Apple TV Ultra” with a state of the art M-class chip alongside a renamed standard “Apple TV” and an all-in-one OLED TV in two sizes with the same M-class chip in the new Apple TV Ultra. Announce a multi-billion dollar AAA gaming platform and several new AAA gaming partners. This fixes Apple’s AAA problem in the living room and on macOS. Don’t make games, court gaming companies and have them make the games—content ends of being political, have others play that game. Promote the many apps users can use to watch movies and TV shows.

Announce a new fully drag-and-drop design app for making app icons, company logos and branding, and even websites with a couple of partners including SquareSpace for the web publishing end—web publishing being just one of the new pro app’s features. Include AI so users can speak object and graphics changes into existence as well as use drag-and-drop to create them without voice.

Improve Mac Studio giving it some level of user expansion, rename it Mac Pro and discontinue current Mac Pro.

Announce iMac Studio with large floating OLED display, rear and front facing ports. And possibly a touchscreen add-on for bringing the display down into EaselMode for use with the only model of Apple Pencil.

Apple Keyboard Pro — wired keyboard with port hub and backlighting, available in short and extended versions.

Apple Mouse Pro — ergonomic, six buttons, available in wired and wireless versions.

Update charging plug family to include mid-wattage and high-wattage two and three port GaN options.

TLDR

 

[cbaca51]

I can’t wait to see the price of this with maxed out specs 😆

 

[jinnyman]

if they release M5 ultra with 18" screen, something similar to how MBP 17" was, while keeping its relatively thin proifle by utilizing some kind of vapor chamber cooling whatever. I'd be rolling!!!

 

[Tagbert]

Using the same name for a line up of computers and the CPU/GPUs they rely on would be a terrible idea.

We can be 100% sure it won’t be called Ultra.

Since the Ultra chips have a power draw of about 80w and requires a large copper heat sink. The Mac Studio has two huge fans to dissipate the heat. I really don’t think they will put that chip in this laptop.

I also don’t think they will go with “ultra” as the name of the computer. That just seems to be a name pulled out by the people publishing the rumor to indicate that this will be seen as a step above the regular MBP. Since Apple came up with a new name for the Neo, they may well come up with a new name for this, assuming that they really want to emphasize that it is different rather than just a preview of where the rest of the MBP line is going.

 

[Brother Cavil]

“99%”, I see. Apple’s customers or Apple Mac buyers?

Way back, in early 1990, I upgraded my Mac SE with a 68030 accelerator board (Jobs was gone before SE). Needed that to be able to do the stats analyses for my dissertation. SE/30 was too $$. But after Jobs came back, I extended the life of several Mac by replacing internal and/or upgrading RAM. Tim Cook could have kept the user-installable SSD options … but you know, that’s Tim C$$k.

Yeah, 99% and I'd say probably 95% of Mac buyers. Apple sells tens of millions of Macs each year. Most of those people have no desire whatsoever to upgrade anything. They just want to buy something, plug it in, and use it. They're not techies. Upgrading Macs, even when Apple was more accommodating in their designs, has always been a super fringe niche. It's only more fringe these days.

 

[transpo1]

I'm certain that they do, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem. They have a touch based OS. They have a mouse and keyboard based OS. There's no need to try and fuse them. That's exactly what Microsoft tried to do with Windows.

And yet, that seems to be exactly what they intend to do, so they must have a plan 😉

 

[Brother Cavil]

Please show some respect to Steve and don't refer him as "guy". You can do that to Tim Cole, I don't care.
If you don't respect Steve, get out of the Apple Ecosystem.

Lol. I guarantee that I've been a customer MUCH longer than you. He's a guy. And he's been dead for over a decade. Nothing I said was disrespectful. What is disrespectful is the endless parade of "Steve would/would never" posts on these forums. He was a visionary, but he's gone. It's time everyone let him rest in peace. Apple is a very different company today and none of us have any idea what he would or would not be doing about touchscreen Macs, AI, or anything else.

 

[Tagbert]

I wonder how many users like me use our MacBooks closed connected to an external monitor where these features a meaningless.

I keep mine open and connected to an external monitor. I keep communication apps on the laptop screen and production on the external. It would feel cramps to shut that screen.

 

[Nyx1]

Why so hard we get MacOS on iPad

 

[bigglow]

Macs are not gaming laptops, so most people won’t put up with the size, weight, and noise of a gaming laptop; especially after the relief of leaving those things behind with the Intel days.

People bought into the Intel MBP 16" because they needed the extra grunt.

People who buy into the Pro & Studio Ultras want it.

 

[Tagbert]

I think the logic is that at the price point of the Ultra the incremental cost of making it a touch screen is very small so if you never ever use it then it's no big deal. Like the radio in my car that I never use. I don't mind that it's there even though I never use.

The earlier rumors were that the touch layer would be fullyintegrated into the OLED layer, not a separate film on top. So it would not obscure the image and likely not add much to cost.

 

[Christopher Kim]

This higher-tier "MBP/MBU" is interesting. I think there's a scenario where:

- the existing MBP line / design energy of "chonky but powerful" (especially the 16") remains. You get Pro and Max chips available
- new line brings OLED, but a thinner / more portable design. Same Pro and Max chips, but $1k+ higher starting price, base for base. Both can be upgraded with fairly similar memory/storage. Maybe 32GB / 1TB is the base config (similar to what they did with new M5 Pro MBP generation, upgraded 24GB / 1TB base

Also separately:
- there seem to be parallels here with what Apple was trying to do with the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro / Pro Max. The design language of the 17 Pros lean chonky / thick, but has the best of everything. The Air put a premium on design / weight / feel, with a discount on features, for a very similar price. The relative "failure" of the iPhone Air not withstanding, I think they just gimped it too much for the price point. And it never recovered after a tough launch
- But the hypothesis that there is a market who will pay a premium price, but want the sleeker design and willing to live with some performance compromises, does exist. And is sizable enough to have a product that targets them.

Could be interesting.

 

[mrmod]

A touch screen would be completely useless imo, unless it it had a a 360 hinge.

 

[goobot]

And nothing said about running iPad apps on this new laptop? It’s already possible to run iPad apps on an Apple silicon Mac if the developer approves it but this thing might really cannibalize the iPad Pro.

Always found it dumb I can’t just run any iPad app like how I can run any iPhone app on iPad,

 

[Marty80]

This paints a cloud of darkness for me updating my macbook m1 max this year. Downunder a maxed out Macbook pro 16” will set you back over $7,000 kanga dollars.

The mere idea that product refresh will set you more than double the cost of whats on offer. I prefer to hang onto my macbook for as long as it lasts or until they update the macbook pro with the ultra features.