Apple on Wednesday unveiled a touch-screen laptop, a product that past company leaders once bluntly dismissed.
At an event in Los Angeles, John Ternus, Apple’s newly minted chief executive, introduced a version of the MacBook Pro that users will be able to control by touching its screen, similar to an iPhone.
The new Mac is the latest step into a new era for the consumer electronics giant. After years of sticking to its knitting, Apple is starting to reimagine some of its key products, from the iPhone to laptop computers.
The laptop is the third new product for the company since Mr. Ternus succeeded Tim Cook in September. Last month, the company unveiled its first foldable smartphone, the iPhone Duo. And earlier this month, it introduced a new tablet for the home, called the HomeView.
Mr. Ternus, who first helped design screens for Macs and later led hardware engineering at Apple, is leaning into his 25-year history at the company while demonstrating that he is willing to rethink decisions made by his predecessors.
In 2010, a year before his death, Steve Jobs dismissed the idea of a touch-screen laptop, calling it “ergonomically terrible.” Two years later, Mr. Cook, Mr. Jobs’s successor, doubled down when investors asked whether the MacBook and iPad would someday merge into one product. He compared the idea to combining a toaster with a refrigerator.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Ternus presented a touch-screen as the natural next step for the Mac.
“As we like to do around here, we asked ourselves: How do we make the MacBook Pro even better?” Mr. Ternus said. “This display provides so much more than touch.”
The laptop will start at $2,899 and be available on Nov. 6.
Apple has made an about-face on products before. In 2010, Mr. Jobs mocked competitors who were making miniature tablets and said they should be sold with sandpaper so people could file their fingers down to use them. But two years later, Mr. Cook introduced the iPad mini, a product that he said he personally believed in.
Apple was not the first to create any of its new products. The biggest makers of personal computers — Lenovo, HP and Dell — each sell their own touch-screen laptops. But touch-screen laptops have yet to become mainstream. In the first half of this year, touch-screen laptops accounted for 16 percent of all laptop shipments, according to IDC, which tracks consumer electronics markets.
Still, with the new MacBook Pro, Apple is betting that it can win the market with a more polished device and a supply chain that can quickly deliver millions of products.
Like nearly all consumer electronics companies, Apple is raising prices because the components it uses are becoming more expensive, thanks in part to the artificial intelligence boom that is causing demand for memory chips to skyrocket. Apple raised the prices of its Macs in June, with the base model of the MacBook Pro increasing $300 to $1,999.
A splashy new feature can be an incentive for consumers to overlook higher price tags, said Jitesh Ubrani, a director of consumer devices research at IDC. He added that the touch-screen laptop might appeal to people in creative businesses who spend more time editing photos and videos.
“One way to justify that price increase is to give more features,” Mr. Ubrani said. “You could add to that and make it seem like a better value.”
But for Apple, which once said its process for designing products had “1,000 no’s for every yes,” churning out many new types of products creates new risks.
The company now sells six types of Macs, six types of iPhones and four types of iPads, each with minor distinctions and with many options on features like screen size, storage capacity and the type of glass for a screen. That can confuse consumers.
Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst who worked in product marketing at Apple from 2013 to 2016, said Apple’s current product strategy reminded him of the 1990s, when Apple was run by John Sculley and nearing bankruptcy. At the time, the company offered a wide range of computers. When Mr. Jobs became chief executive again, he killed most of the products to focus on just a few.
Today, Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world, with a market capitalization of $5 trillion. But the new strategy, Mr. Gartenberg said, is still “such a nontraditional Apple way of doing things.”
“It sort of feels like it’s a thousand yeses for every no,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Whatever we’ve got cooking in the lab, just put them out there.”
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