Have you been asking for a touchscreen MacBook? Apple has finally delivered with the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display. Some believe Apple made the right move before by never incorporating a touchscreen. In my opinion, they’re only useful with convertible laptops anyway. But some are giddy, certain this is the right choice considering that touchscreen laptops have been around from other brands for some time. And this could be a game-changer for creatives.
Along with the touch experience on the tandem OLED 14-inch and 16-inch display, the laptops employ thin and lightweight designs (3 and 4 lbs., respectively), come loaded with the M5 Pro or M5 Max chip, and boast up to 24 hours battery life.
With up to 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness, you can comfortably use the laptop both indoors and out. It offers 10,000,000:1 contrast, an adaptive 10-120Hz variable refresh rate, and a wider colour gamut covering both P3 and Adobe RGB.
The defining feature, however, is that for the first time on a Mac, it has a touchscreen. Crafted specifically for Mac, you can use this for creative tasks, like manipulating 3D models and playing musical instruments. But it’s also handy for everyday tasks, like scrolling webpages, swiping, pinching to zoom on a photo, dragging and dropping slides, double tapping a window to fill the screen, and flicking to tile it into place. Developers can also consider unique ways to incorporate touch sensitivity into their Mac apps, though many will work right away since Mac automatically translates touches into clicks. The touch sensor is built directly into the display panel versus being layered on top of it, which help reduce latency, says Apple.
Along with the powerful M5 Pro or M5 Max chip, the laptop offers up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 16TB storage. It has an enhanced six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos support along with studio quality mics and dedicated audio tuning. There’s also three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack. Enjoy video calls and recordings using the 12MP Center Stage camera.
It comes loaded with and macOS 27 with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. The Dynamic Island is now on Mac serving as the home for Spotlight,1 Live Activities, and Siri AI.2 Use it to quickly search for anything on the computer, just as you might on an iPhone. It also displays Live Activities as it does on iPhone.
The PROLED XDR display uses tandem OLED technology with Extreme Dynamic Range (XDR), offering more precision for content creators, photographers, colourists, and designers who need a reference-calibre display. Brightness and grayscale is kept uniform across the entire display, while internal reflections common in traditional OLED designs are minimized.
Ideal for pro users, including filmmakers, photographers, design, and even medical imaging, there are advanced features like Apple Pro Display Calibrator, Apple Color Matching Function 2026, Apple Creator Studio, and support for genlock.
In addition to the PROLED XDR display, it supports up to three external displays with M5 Pro and up to four with M5 Max. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 provide fast, reliable wireless connectivity, and Touch ID enables a quick, easy, and secure login experience. With its fast-charge capability, MacBook Pro can charge up to 50% in just 30 minutes.3
The Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display with M5 Pro starts at $3,999 ($3,789 for education) and is now available for pre-order, shipping starting Friday, November 6. The version with M5 Max starts at $6,299 ($5,869 for education).