Reuters reports that Apple is expected to unveil its first touchscreen MacBooks on Wednesday at an event in Los Angeles, capping a burst of product launches ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.

The event follows the September launch of the folding iPhone Duo at Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters and a smart home hub event in New York earlier this month. The touchscreen laptops would mark a major shift for Apple's oldest product line.

The move is surprising because Apple executives spent years rejecting touch on laptops. Steve Jobs said in 2010 that touchscreens on laptops were "ergonomically terrible," and then-CEO Tim Cook said in 2012 that such devices would be as pleasing as converging a toaster and a refrigerator.

Before becoming CEO, John Ternus argued Apple already made a touchscreen computer with the iPad. Touchscreens have been standard on Windows devices for more than a decade, and as the iPhone nears its two-decade anniversary, a new generation of buyers simply expects screens to respond to touch.

Analysts view the shift as reality catching up with Apple. "I believe they were always wrong on pushing back on touch, and this is the long arm of reality setting in," said Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, adding that "some things are purely inevitable."

The company has seen an uptick in Mac sales, but much of that growth has come from technology enthusiasts and businesses buying machines to handle AI tasks on-device, making customer response to touch a key open question.

According to Bloomberg News reporting cited by Reuters, Apple plans to ship the touchscreen models with the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips already found in MacBook Pro models, meaning the new machines would not gain a significant performance boost over existing ones.

That could blunt enthusiasm among power users. "The only thing people want is more memory and better processors for local models!" prominent tech commentator Jason Calacanis, host of the All-In Podcast, wrote on X.

Wednesday's event answers a question Apple has dodged since the iPad era: whether the touchscreens it made mainstream belong in its oldest product line.

This week Apple also announced an upgraded base MacBook Pro with a new M6 chip, so the touchscreen announcement caps an unusually busy stretch of Mac news.

How holiday buyers respond to touch on a MacBook could determine whether the change becomes a permanent fixture of the lineup or a cautious experiment.