Apple sure takes its own sweet time. On Monday, the company sent out invitations to a product announcement happening next Wednesday, which the company’s marketing chief teased in a message on X: “Can’t wait to pro and tell next week.” That’s likely a reference to a new MacBook Pro from the company, which Bloomberg has reported will be Apple’s first touchscreen laptop.

Apparently pigs really do fly. For over a decade, Apple has treated touchscreen laptops like some kind of mutant offspring of computers and tablets, a category it had zero interest in. On a 2012 earnings call, Apple’s then-CEO Tim Cook had a memorable response to a question about the growing number of touchscreen Windows laptops coming on the market: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” 

“We’re not going to that party,” Cook added. 

A number of things have changed since then. Touchscreens have become somewhat normalized as laptop features. About one in every five notebook computers sold has such capabilities, by one estimate. More recently, Cook handed off the Apple CEO baton to John Ternus, a longtime hardware engineering executive who is much more of a product guy than his predecessor. 

Clearly, a new touchscreen laptop had to have been in the works long before Apple’s leadership transition. Still, it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Ternus’ rising stature within the company had something to do with it. Whoever was behind the decision, the first wave of products from the Ternus administration—the iPhone Duo foldable smartphone, HomeView smart display and now possibly a touchscreen MacBook—seems to be sending the message that Apple is ready to embrace categories it previously ignored. That’s a good thing.

In Other News

• Elon Musk pledged to give every child in the U.S. one share of SpaceX stock next year, a gift that could be worth almost $11 billion in total. 
•  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek from their computer systems and bars those agencies from making future purchases from DeepSeek.
• Federal prosecutors accused the former OpenAI employee who allegedly bugged the company’s offices of having ties to the Saudi royal family.  

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