Apple has finally added a touchscreen to the MacBook Pro

Apple has announced a new generation of its MacBook Pro laptops, which now come equipped with an ultra-bright, touchscreen OLED display, a lighter weight design and, once again, a glowing Apple logo on the lid.

The MacBook Pro ProLED, as Apple’s website calls it, is surprisingly similar in spec to the standard MacBook Pro. The main difference, as referenced in the name, is the screen: it uses a tandem OLED panel, like what you’d find in recent generations of the iPad Pro. It’s touch sensitive, making this the first MacBook ever to come with a touchscreen, and can produce up to 2000 nits peak brightness when displaying HDR content or working outdoors. The mini-LED screen on the standard MacBook Pro, meanwhile, tops out at 1600 nits.

Unless you’ve been firmly Apple-only for the past two decades, you probably have some experience using a touchscreen laptop. The MacBook Pro with ProLED is basically that: a MacBook with a touchscreen.Apple

Excitingly for photographers, the screen not only supports the P3 colorspace, but the AdobeRGB one as well. Like the displays on the standard MacBook Pros, it can refresh at up to 120Hz, and the new models are ever-so-slightly higher resolution than the non-touchscreen ones. That’s thanks to the fact that, instead of a notch, there’s now a “Dynamic Island” cutout that will provide quick shortcuts and information, like it does on the company’s phones. Apple has also subtly shrunk the bezels, making the 14″ model’s footprint a touch smaller while keeping the same size display, and making the 16″‘s screen slightly larger.

Apple also says that the new models are a bit thinner and substantially lighter than the previous models. Despite this, the 14″ model comes with a slightly higher-capacity battery than the non-touchscreen version, while both 16″ models top out at 100Wh, the maximum you can take on a plane. Apple’s battery benchmarks promise you’ll get the same amount of usage out of the touchscreen models as the standard ones.

Beyond the display and chassis, the ProLED models are much the same as the standard ones: they have the same selection of ports, same webcam, support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and touchID sensor. The six-speaker audio system has been slightly upgraded, with Apple promising “50% deeper bass” and “remarkable clarity” thanks to redesigned woofers and tweeters.

Apple says it’s updated the laptop’s hinge, too, so it won’t move around as much when you touch the screen.Apple

Interestingly, Apple hasn’t used this launch to introduce the higher-end Pro or Max variants of its M6-generation chips. Instead, the laptops will be available with the M5 Pro or M5 Max that launched earlier this year with the more standard MacBook Pros. The one difference in the chips is that the highest-end versions of the ProLED computers can be equipped with 16TB of storage (a $7000 option), where the standard models top out at 8TB (an upgrade that runs a mere $3000).

These are the first MacBooks that Apple has ever sold with touchscreens (though there have been home-brew options in the past), and the company has given surprisingly little detail as to how macOS will deal with the new input method. This is, of course, well-trod ground for computers in general – laptops with OLED touchscreens running Windows have been around for years – but Microsoft has famously put in a lot of work to make sure its operating system and programs will work well with touch.

Apple says the display will support multi-touch for gesture control like pinching to zoom, and that touch interactions like dragging a 3D model around can work in tandem with keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures. The company says its apps are “optimized” for the new laptop, and that its OS will provide compatability with most apps by translating touches into mouse clicks. It’s also providing ways for developers to build “intuitive experiences designed specifically for Touch” into their apps.

The MacBook Pro ProLED will be available starting November 6th, with the 14″ model starting at $2899, and the 16″ starting at $3399, both of which come equipped with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, though the M5 Pro in the base 16″ model has a few more CPU and GPU cores. A comparable non-touchscreen 14″ MacBook Pro will run $2499, and the standard 16″ starts at $2999, and, at least for the moment, it seems like Apple is planning on having both lines run in parallel, rather than replacing the non-touchscreen models with the laptops announced today.

Earlier in the week, Apple announced updates to several other computers. The iMac and the standard 14″ MacBook Pro were both upgraded to include the company’s latest M6 chip, starting at $1499 and $1999, respectively. If you’ve been following computer news at all, you won’t be shocked to hear that those are higher than the launch prices of the previous models. Apple also finally updated the iPad Mini, giving it an 8.5″ OLED display (which, sadly, still tops out at 60Hz), IP67 dust and water-resistance rating, and an upgraded A20 Pro chip. It starts at $699.

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