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Apple Planning 'MacBook Ultra' With Touchscreen and Higher Price

These rumors do not make much sense to me.

First, macOS is not designed to have touch, and no Mac has a touch screen, not even the MacBook Neo that has just been released. A top-tier MacBook, being more expensive, will have a more limited availability, and therefore will provide less incentive for developers to adopt this kind of input. So it does not make much sense.

Second, the MacBook Pro already uses the M5 Max processors, and the next step would be the M5 Ultra. I am not sure a laptop can accommodate such a processor while remaining reasonably thin and light. Also, I am not sure Apple would create an intermediate processor between the M5 Max and the M5 Ultra, just for this laptop. Sounds odd.

Third, the MacBook Pro can be specced up north of $7,000 already, which is far more than nearly any Windows laptop. I am not sure there will be a significant market for even more expensive laptops. And I am not sure Apple will find specs to justify an even more premium price, considering that a beefed-up MacBook Pro can go up to an 18-core CPU and a 40-core GPU with 128 GB RAM and 8 TB storage.

Fourth, OLED alone does not justify an even more expensive laptop. There are plenty of Windows laptops offering an OLED screen for less than $1,000. The natural course would be for Apple to incorporate OLED screens in the next revisions of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro.

So, these rumors do not seem to make sense for Apple from a business perspective.
 
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SvenLorenz1975 said:
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.
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Why nobody wants a lighter machine?

Is the lighter redesign going to change the current chasis of the MacBook Pro lineup or just for the new "Ultra" lineup?
 
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SvenLorenz1975 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Lighter is what I want more than any other feature in a laptop. I'm ready for one that is sub 2.5lb.

Same goes for iPhones.. Lighter, please! >200g
 
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Apple does not need to make a touch-enabled Mac. All the problems would be solved if Apple allowed users to choose between macOS and iPadOS on the iPad Pros. I would try macOS on my 13 inches ipad pro m4 with magic
keyboard.
 
surfzen21 said:
I hate the fact that my thumb slightly touches the screen when I open my current laptop.

No way I want to put even more smudges on a screen. This seems like it would benefit greatly from nano texture glass.
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The irony is how Apple spent years telling us how stupid it was that anyone would want glossy screens. Not entirely sure why they went away from matte screens in the first place.
 
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I just want an OLED 14in MBP. Why is this so hard for Apple to make? Literally every other device in my house is OLED at this point.
 
starlabjump said:
Apple does not need to make a touch-enabled Mac. All the problems would be solved if Apple allowed users to choose between macOS and iPadOS on the iPad Pros. I would try macOS on my 13 inches ipad pro m4 with magic
keyboard.
Click to expand...

If Apple went that direction, you really think Apple would allow you to use your current iPad?

They damn sure would require you to purchase another one, for whatever made up reason. 😂
 
rforno said:
MacBook Pro Plus
MacBook Pro Premium
MacBook Pro Ultra
MacBook Pro Cook Edition
etc etc etc
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CookBook Business Casual and CookBook Business Casual Air Neo-n SE.

Now you can run iPadOS on a Mac using only keyboard and mouse. We think you're going to love it.
 
LIVEFRMNYC said:
If Apple went that direction, you really think Apple would allow you to use your current iPad?

They damn sure would require you to purchase another one, for whatever made up reason. 😂
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Yeah.

I clearly remember that Apple once said Stage Manager would not work on A-series chips.
 
I think this is going to have to do something dramatic to be worth it, I can't see Apple just slapping a touchscreen on a macbook pro, making it a few cm thinner and a 15" bezel-less OLED (to fit into a 14" MBP sized frame) and making it glossy black for $3600.

My guess - this is going to be a new form factor. Introducing touch to macOS on a niche laptop makes no sense, as no developers are going to go out of their way to support 0.01% of users. Plus touch on a laptop still doesn't make sense - it is nice to have, sure, but not a device defining feature.
 
skaertus said:
First, macOS is not designed to have touch, and no Mac has a touch screen, not even the MacBook Neo that has just been released. A top-tier MacBook, being more expensive, will have a more limited availability, and therefore will provide less incentive for developers to adopt this kind of input. So it does not make much sense.
Click to expand...
There's a rumor (no better/worse than the MB Ultra rumor) that the next MacBook Neo will have touchscreen. You're right - touchscreen alone isn't going to justify a super-premium price, but the other specs of the computer might.

skaertus said:
Third, the MacBook Pro can be specced up north of $7,000 already
Click to expand...
The MBP with the best processor is about $4400. Any price above that comes from adding extras like RAM and SSD which will likely cost the same when added to a MB Ultra, and isn't really a valid comparison. If your work needs 128GB RAM and 8TB SSD on a MBP it will still need 128GB RAM and 8TB SSD on a MacBook Ultra. Not that there's any reason that the MBP and MBU price ranges can't overlap if they're offering different feature sets.

skaertus said:
Fourth, OLED alone does not justify an even more expensive laptop. There are plenty of Windows laptops offering an OLED screen for less than $1,000.
Click to expand...

Well that rather depends on little things like size, resolution, colour space, dynamic range, refresh rate, burn-in resistance... for starters, we're probably talking tandem OLED as used on the iPad Pros. This article suggests that Tandem OLED adds about $700 to the purchase price of the Dell laptop, so that's likely to be at least $1000 in Apple dollars 🙂

StuBeck said:
The irony is how Apple spent years telling us how stupid it was that anyone would want glossy screens. Not entirely sure why they went away from matte screens in the first place.
Click to expand...
Apple are selling Apple products. Any feature that Apple products lack will be stupid until Apple adds it - at which point it will be magical and courageous.

However - thanks to those pesky laws of physics, matte screens reduce contrast by scattering ambient light, some of which ends up in your eye. Glossy screens can be arranged so that they reflect light from lamps or windows away from your eye. I've experienced this directly in a room where the screen was periodically hit by sunlight & the blinds were rubbish: Matte PC screens were completely wiped out by sunlight from any angle. Glossy Apple 27" Cinema Display was still usable unless the sun was right behind it. Newer Apple screens have great optical treatments that actually reduce reflections, rather than scatter them which makes them even better.

I think there's a personal thing that some people get bugged by faint but recognisable reflections in a glossy screen but others get bugged by loss of contrast. Plus there's the old "Pros use matte displays because it has always been thus".
 
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SvenLorenz1975 said:
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.
Click to expand...
This is S tier bait ☠️
 
dazzer21-2 said:
So, just to be clear... is Ultra the 'de facto' name or is this speculative? If it is Ultra, is it going to have an M5 Ultra chip? That strikes me as somewhat overkill for a laptop.
Click to expand...
Speculative.
As is the existence and likely specs of any M5 Ultra.

However, Apple makes MacBook Pros that don't have M5 Pro chips - and marketing people use things like "pro", "ultra", "max" or "XL" as meaning-free labels to distinguish price points so anything is possible. Don't over-think it or you'll end up getting a headache over how "ultra" can be more than "max".

It's not even clear at the moment whether the selling point of "MB Ultra" is going to be an ultra thin and light executive toy that will fit into a manilla envelope alongside a MacBook Air or an ultra powerful mobile workstation for training local AI models in an airplane toilet.
 
So will the MacBook Ultra have an ultra Apple Silicon chip in it or will there be a MacBook Ultra with a Max chip in it, a pro chip in it etc?

Naming it Ultra would make their lineup more confusing, but not as confusing as Dell's laptop current nomenclature which ironically, Dell copied from Apple. I guess if the MacBook Ultra is the only MacBook with an ultra chip in it, that would justify the name.

When you differentiate products from each other you need to focus on what is unique with each product that would inspire someone to buy it over another product. The name of that product should ihnerently reflect what is unique about it. So, if it's going to be the only laptop with touch, then it should be called "MacBook Touch" for example.
 
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To me it is going to create three levels of mac buyer which is quite wise from a selling standpoint.

Having these three levels will make it easy on new customers coming in for their first purchase.There are some people who will buy the top of the line anything for no reason other than it is top of the line. You want to capture those customers.
 
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Madonepro said:
Three types of ‘Pro’s’ that use Apple devices; Videographers, Photographers/Graphic Designers, and Coders/Developers.
I know a few in the first two categories, and many in the latter category, and none think a touch screen has a use case in their workflow, and as an aside, they all hated the Touch Bar.
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Ahh, the Touch Bar. I used it to scroll video and fill passwords a few times. Memories.
 
groove-agent said:
So will the MacBook Ultra have an ultra Apple Silicon chip in it or will there be a MacBook Ultra with a Max chip in it, a pro chip in it etc?

Naming it Ultra would make their lineup more confusing, but not as confusing as Dell's laptop current nomenclature which ironically, Dell copied from Apple. I guess if the MacBook Ultra is the only MacBook with an ultra chip in it, that would justify the name.

When you differentiate products from each other you need to focus on what is unique with each product that would inspire someone to buy it over another product. The name of that product should ihnerently reflect what is unique about it. So, if it's going to be the only laptop with touch, then it should be called "MacBook Touch" for example.
Click to expand...
Don’t know how they could possibly fit an Ultra chip in this thing if it has a slimmed down enclosure, which has been rumored…
 
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