Before You Tap the New MacBook Pro, Read How Apple Makes Up Its Mind

Somewhere right now, a person who owns both an iPad and a MacBook is reaching toward the laptop screen to scroll a page, then stopping half an inch short out of habit. Apple spent years endorsing that hesitation. As The New York Times reported, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook both dismissed the idea of a touch-screen laptop, and bluntly. On Wednesday, at an event in Los Angeles, the company's newly minted chief executive, John Ternus, introduced one anyway: Apple's first touch-screen MacBook Pro. The Times describes Ternus as reimagining some of the company's most important products. If you have put real money and some loyalty into Apple's idea of what a computer should be, the news raises a personal question. Were those old refusals a philosophy, or a schedule? Your answer will shape how you weigh the next purchase.

Much of the early coverage tells this as a broken founder's rule, a successor overruling two famous refusals. That framing assumes Apple runs on fixed convictions. A company whose own anniversary history describes it as born, nearly dead, and born again has a looser grip on conviction than the legend suggests. The first hands-on reporting also deflates some of the drama: Ars Technica's reviewer found the new machine less of a departure from the previous design than expected, with the OLED display doing most of the impressing. A single news cycle can't show you whether this is a break or a habit. Settling that takes a history long enough to watch Apple say no, wait, and later say yes with a straight face.

David Pogue's Apple arrives for the company's fiftieth anniversary and covers the whole run, from two scruffy twentysomethings named Steve founding a startup on April 1, 1976, through the near-death years and the rebirth under Jobs, to the climb under Cook to the most valuable company in the world. Pogue, a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, built the book on new interviews with 150 people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, and Jony Ive, along with current designers, engineers, and executives. Fifty years is the span you need this week. A touch-screen MacBook makes sense as a decision once you can line it up against the company's earlier choices about what to build and when.

The book's keywords trace the laptop line from PowerBook through MacBook Air and reach forward to Vision Pro and artificial intelligence. That range suggests Pogue follows Apple's portables past the famous launches and into the less photogenic years. If those chapters get the care he gives the founding, you get a running record of how Apple's product calls pile up: which ideas sat on a shelf for years, and how the company explained itself when it finally shipped them.

The jacket copy credits Apple with introducing the public to the mouse, laser printing, CD-ROM, WiFi, touchscreen phones, and tablets. "Introducing the public to" is a careful phrase, and it should be. Bringing something to a mass audience is its own achievement, separate from inventing it, and a trustworthy history has to say plainly which is which. That distinction bears directly on the new laptop. If Apple's past is any guide, its touch-screen MacBook Pro belongs to the bring-it-to-everyone category, a late arrival betting that arriving well is enough.

Pogue's interviews earn their place here for a plainer reason. The description credits Jobs's obsessive eye for detail with setting the stage for the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and the rest, and the touch-screen refusals were judgments by particular executives with particular habits. Corporate principles often turn out to be one executive's taste, preserved long after the executive has left. A book that puts you in the room with the people who shaped Apple gives you a fair shot at telling a principle from a preference.

My reservation is the format. A lavishly illustrated anniversary volume, written with access to the people it describes, runs a real risk of turning into a family album. The jacket copy calls Apple's culture subversive, a word that strains when attached to the most valuable company in the world. Pogue promises new facts that correct the record and bust long-held myths, which is encouraging, though correcting small myths is easier work than questioning the big one, that Apple always knew best. I would read the Cook-era chapters with the most care, since they involve living executives and the freshest relationships.

Even so, the book gives the touch-screen news a human shape: a company that kept changing its mind while telling a consistent story about itself.

That half-inch hesitation over the screen was always a quiet settlement between your habits and a company's taste, and for years Apple made the call for you. Now the decision sits back on your desk. Pogue's book will not tell you whether to buy the new MacBook Pro, and it should not try. What fifty years of Apple history can give you is the knowledge that the people who once said no were making choices for their own moment. Their verdict on touch screens belonged to them. The verdict on your arm and your work belongs to you, and a long account of a company that keeps changing its mind is good company while you reach it.