As diehards still found themselves bending over backward to acquire the folding iPhone Duo, Apple rolled out the blue carpet in L.A. for the grand finale of a multi-city series of product-launch events.

Attendees from across the globe packed a low-lit concrete room with thumping drum and bass on Sunset Boulevard to witness freshly minted CEO John Ternus announce a long-anticipated update: a touchscreen MacBook Pro. The latest laptop from the company comes with what they call a PROLED XDR Display, which allows for multitouch interaction, not to mention even more accurate color and greater brightness in a lighter, thinner form factor in both 14- and 16-inch sizes. The release day unfolded with a variety of, well, hands-on experiences and presentations by directors, VFX experts, artists (including a sculptor who makes iron-lung-looking tubes that create microclimates for bouquets), music producers, and others who’d had two days to secretly take the devices into their workflow — a showcase, called Pro and Tell, befitting the Hollywood locale.

Since unveiling the iPhone in 2007, Apple has been responsible for turning the world to touch (those conscious during the pre-iPhone era might recall that other companies’ early touchscreens were often unresponsive and cumbersome). But until now Apple had steered clear of including multitouch displays on its Mac computers. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late co-founder and CEO, vowed to keep the iOfferings and Macs distinct, focusing on classic high-performance displays for the latter.

So while it may seem that a tad of irreverence inspired this latest update, the touch-enabled MacBook Pro’s design remains Cupertino to its core. Both models maintain the familiar unibody aluminum chassis — the single piece of milled metal that’s structured the MacBook offerings since 2008. That design came from Jony Ive, the brand’s influential design leader until 2019, who was behind portable products for the company from the playful and bright multicolor iBooks to the Dieter Rams-inflected minimalist metal machines. The Los Angeles event felt like an extension of this ethos — toeing the line between ubiquity and luxury right down to the drink menus in Apple display typography, the decision to cover signage that didn’t fit its aesthetic, and the replacement of built-in soap dispensers with Dries Van Noten hand soap. (The new touchscreen MacBook Pro starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch version and $3,399 for the 16-inch.)

This is to say, Apple products are always, insistently, Apple. But although the new MacBook Pro is recognizable as a MacBook, its innovation lies in how it bridges interface and object. To that end, the design and human interface teams collaborated in an open studio, with software engineers and CAD sculptors, hardware experts and laser specialists working side by side.

Molly Anderson, the company’s VP of industrial design, says the team started by auditing the Mac’s existing architecture. The PROLED XDR — the first OLED display on a MacBook — shouldn’t feel like an iPad with a keyboard: “Touch needed to feel like it belongs to the Mac, not borrowed from another device,” she says. That meant thinking about the laptop as a whole, from opening it with one hand to gliding across the display and trackpad, down to the less obvious details — like a hinge smooth enough to adjust but firm enough not to wiggle when you point and swipe. This close study of the screen and how it fits into the laptop “enabled a new layer structure in the display,” Anderson explains.

Those layers include not just the display’s physicality but also what’s on it and how it responds. Steve Lemay, Apple’s VP of human interface design, sought “seamless integration of hardware and software.” Apple built the touch sensor into the panel rather than placing it on top. The result is that “there’s almost no distance left between your finger and your content,” Lemay says. “It starts to feel like you’re reaching past the glass itself to touch what’s underneath,” he enthuses, adding that touch is meant to complement, rather than replace, the trackpad and keyboard. And while the result remains very much a Mac experience, Apple did borrow the Dynamic Island from the iPhone to offer easy access to quick functions and notifications.

During my brief foray behind the interface, I was also impressed by the absence of fingerprints (the same can’t be said for the greasy antique MacBook Air I’m writing this on) and by the colors; brand representatives pointed out that screens had never shown, for example, yellows like these. And it was true, I had never seen that color yellow, or maybe green, on a screen before. (The aforementioned flowers looked even more real as content than as cut stems in a glass tube!) And while the device is still very fresh, some presenters had already vibe-coded new interactive photo, video, and 3D modeling software that showcased both the intuitive ways you could, for example, torque the handle of a rendered teacup, and playful and surprising ways to smash and brush across photos. The de-frictioned touch experience offered new opportunities.