Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook May use Liquid Glass

Apple has earned a reputation for its meticulous attention to detail, both in software design and hardware polish. But not all the big changes the company has taken have turned out as the company expected. Ten years ago, Scott Forstall was famously fired from Apple following the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. In 2025, Apple divided opinion with its ecosystem-wide Liquid Glass design. The new design language, inspired by the transparency of glass and fluid movement, was criticized for consistency and readability problems, which forced the company to make many changes and finally provide dedicated controls to reduce the effect of glass in the UI.

But it seems that the entire Liquid Glass makeover was a preparatory work for future Apple hardware, especially the MacBook and its much-anticipated OLED refresh with a touchscreen display. According to Bloomberg, Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pro should arrive in late 2027, rocking a touch-sensitive panel with an iPhone-inspired Dynamic Island cutout on top. Now, there are two ways to look at it. The ugly and underutilized notch goes away. Its place will be taken by the pill-shaped camera that we will now interact with, expanding to show the progress of the work and provide a complex of functions woven into it.

If you look at the Mac developer community, there are a lot of apps out there that have turned the Note into a calendar hub, a gamepad, a clipboard slot, and much more. But basically, you can do more with the click of a mouse or trackpad. Imagine the level of interaction that could be baked into if it supported long and short finger presses or swipe-based gestures, such as widget stacking. Both of these ideas have been used on iPhones and iPads already.

The touch-sensitive screen on MacBooks will be more than just a display of Dynamic Island interaction. And it seems like the Liquid Glass design was just a preparatory phase in macOS’s gradual move away from vanilla keyboard and mouse input to a hybrid format. “The update includes more padding on some icons and notifications, as well as sliders in the control center menu that look optimized for touch,” Bloomberg reported. I’ve heard this over and over in my time spent on all Apple laptops and tablets.

I use my iPad Pro almost as my trusty Apple laptop, and I like the Liquid Glass look on it more than the MacBook Air, and it’s not just that the tablet has a better OLED screen. The combination of touch and keyboard-based input actually feels very productive, especially when I’m editing design assets for my sister’s clothing website or editing videos. In iPadOS 26, Apple actually included many macOS features, such as the Menu Bar, and they feel more at home on the iPad.

That is not a coincidence. Apple probably won’t allow iPad dual-boot macOS, but the recent redesign of its design with desktop-grade utilities like Stage Manager is a clear sign that Apple is using the iPad (Air and Pro) increasingly as a computer as an experimental way to turn macOS into a touch-based operating system. Just look at the pro-grade apps that have recently arrived on the iPad, including Apple’s Creators Studio bundle in 2026, to see how well they integrate a native keyboard and touch-based input. I firmly believe that there will be no operational shock or learning curve when Macs become touchscreen friendly. On the contrary, it will be the redemption of Liquid Glass.