Apple has put a touchscreen on the Mac. For years the company said touch didn’t belong on a laptop. Now the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has it, along with a tandem OLED panel and a Dynamic Island where the notch used to be.
Pre-orders opened October 28 in 30 countries. Machines arrive from November 6.
The display
PROLED XDR is a tandem OLED panel, meaning two stacked layers of self-lit pixels. Two layers spread the load, so the panel can run brighter and age more slowly than single-layer OLED. Apple quotes up to 2,000 nits peak for both HDR and SDR, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and refresh from 10Hz to 120Hz.
Color is the bigger change for working photographers and designers. The panel covers P3 and Adobe RGB, both in one default preset, with more than 80% of Rec. 2020 for HDR grading. Each panel is calibrated at the factory. There are reference modes for film, photo and print, a new DICOM mode for non-diagnostic medical image review, and genlock support for virtual production sets. The nano-texture option is now etched into the cover glass.
Slimmer borders bring the screens to 14.2 and 16.3 inches.
Touch, done the Mac way
The touch sensor is built into the panel, not laid on top, which Apple says cuts latency. You can swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom, drag slides between decks, double-tap to fill the screen or flick a window to tile it. macOS turns touches into clicks, so older apps work right away. A new hinge keeps the screen from wobbling when you poke it, and the camera feed is stabilized if you touch the screen during a call.
Apple is selling touch as an extra input next to the keyboard and trackpad, not a replacement. The pro uses are where it gets interesting. Logic Pro gets a multi-touch keyboard and drum pads on screen. Final Cut Pro lets editors mark ranges and drop clips by hand. Developers can test iPhone and iPad touch behavior on the Mac itself. Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Shapr3D and the Microsoft Office apps are lined up to support it later this year.
Lighter, same chips
There’s no M6 here. The OLED models use M5 Pro and M5 Max with up to 128GB of unified memory and storage now up to 16TB. M5 Max can run language models with hundreds of billions of parameters locally. The M6 went into the cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro and the iMac a day earlier, covered here.
The OLED stack saves weight. The 14-inch model drops to 3 pounds, half a pound less than before. The 16-inch is 4 pounds, 0.7 pounds lighter. Battery life is rated up to 24 hours. Ports stay generous: three Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, SDXC, MagSafe and a headphone jack, plus Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
The Dynamic Island now holds Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI, the conversational Siri that ships in beta with macOS 27.
Price
The 14-inch with M5 Pro starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399. With M5 Max, the 14-inch starts at $4,499 and the 16-inch at $4,799. The mini-LED MacBook Pro stays on sale for now, so the OLED version is a premium tier above it rather than a straight replacement.
What it means
The screen is the reason to buy this. A calibrated Adobe RGB and P3 OLED panel at 2,000 nits makes a laptop a usable reference display on location, which used to mean carrying a separate monitor.
Touch is the long game. Apple held out on it for more than a decade and now it’s moving carefully, pro apps first, as an option rather than a mode. If developers build for it, the Mac and the iPad will keep drifting toward each other. If they don’t, it’ll be a nice way to scroll.