Welcome to Staten News — where Apple finally lets you touch the Mac, Elon Musk lets committees decide whether his companies get married, and Wisconsin decides it has had enough server farms.
Apple is about to do the thing it spent years telling everyone the Mac didn't need. On Wednesday, at an event it's calling "Pro and Tell" in Los Angeles, the company is expected to show its first touchscreen MacBook Pro, per Bloomberg.
Apple confirmed the date. It didn't confirm the touchscreen. Everybody covering Apple is treating it as done anyway.
🍎 The Drop: What Apple Is Expected to Show Wednesday
This isn't a keynote. Apple is flying some press to L.A. for hands-on time and putting out press releases for everyone else, likely around 10 a.m. Pacific. Here's the expected lineup, based on Bloomberg's reporting and MacRumors' roundup:
OLED MacBook Pro in 14-inch and 16-inch: the first OLED display and first touchscreen on a Mac, with a reinforced hinge and a Dynamic Island replacing the notch
Chips: M5 Pro and M5 Max, the same as the current high-end models. Apple is reportedly skipping the M6 Pro and M6 Max entirely
Entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro: M6 chip, no design change
24-inch iMac: M6 chip, no external change
iPad mini: OLED display, A20 Pro chip, a speaker with no holes, expected to cost about $200 more than today's $599 model
Preorders could open the same day. Availability could come as soon as November 6.
🧠 Why This Matters More Than the Spec Sheet
For years Apple kept touch on the iPad and the keyboard on the Mac. That line protected the iPad from being eaten by the MacBook, and it kept Apple out of the touchscreen laptop fight Windows makers have been running for a decade.
A touchscreen MacBook Pro erases that line at the top of the lineup. And the pricing tells you who it's for. MacRumors expects the OLED models to cost more than the current MacBook Pro, with the existing models possibly sticking around as the cheaper option. Apple isn't chasing volume here. It's raising the ceiling on what a Mac costs.
The chip detail is the quiet part. Shipping a brand-new flagship with last generation's Pro and Max chips, while the entry model gets M6, means the screen is the selling point this cycle. Not the silicon.
That's the tell. Apple's pitch this time isn't speed. It's a screen you can poke.
It also fits a pattern under CEO John Ternus. The Duo foldable iPhone landed in September. The HomeView smart home hub followed in mid-October. Now Macs and an iPad, a week later. Reuters reports that analysts see Ternus pushing to speed up product development, and the calendar backs that up.
📊 Same Day, Different Stage
Apple picked a loud Wednesday. Microsoft and Alphabet both report earnings after the close, and the Fed hands down its rate decision at 2 p.m. ET.
Translation: Apple will spend the morning selling hardware, and Microsoft and Google will spend the evening explaining how much they're spending on AI hardware. After Meta's capex jump last week, the second conversation is the one Wall Street is actually waiting for. Our Finance piece today has the full setup.
🚀 Weekend Callout: The Musk Merger Has Paperwork Now
The SpaceX and Tesla merger talk stopped being a meme last week. On SpaceX's earnings call, Elon Musk said both boards have formed special committees of independent directors to discuss combining the companies.
Musk said he's a conflicted party and isn't on either committee. He also said calling a merger a certainty would be overstating it, while adding that there's "a lot of merit to combining the companies," citing AI software, chip design and robotics. Any deal would need shareholder support at both companies.
The overlap is already real. SpaceX acquired xAI in February. Tesla invested about $2 billion in an AI startup that's a SpaceX subsidiary back in January. And SpaceX's revenue more than doubled last quarter, partly from renting computing capacity to other AI companies.
Special committees don't guarantee anything. They do mean lawyers are billing hours.
🏭 Weekend Callout: Wisconsin Is Done Being Polite About Data Centers
Data centers have turned into a campaign issue in Wisconsin's governor race, and the numbers explain why. In the Marquette Law School Poll from July, more than three-quarters of voters said the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. Last October, that number was 55%.
Republican Tom Tiffany wants to end state subsidies for tech companies. Democrat David Crowley wants guardrails on existing projects. Neither is calling for an outright ban, but both are running away from the industry they used to court. Microsoft is putting more than $7 billion into what it calls "the world's most powerful AI data center" in Mount Pleasant, Racine County.
Because every hyperscaler's AI plan runs through somebody's backyard, this is where the capex story meets the voter. Wall Street is asking if Meta, Microsoft and Google can afford the buildout. Wisconsin is asking whether it wants it at all.
This is the week those two questions land on the same desk.
Sources: MacRumors Pro and Tell preview, Reuters on Apple's Oct. 28 event, NBC News on the SpaceX-Tesla committees, NOTUS on Wisconsin's data center race
— The Bandicoots 💻🍎🔥