Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro adds OLED and a lighter body

Apple has added a touchscreen to the MacBook Pro for the first time. The new model, which Apple calls the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, also moves to an OLED panel, a first for the MacBook Pro line. Apple CEO John Ternus presented the laptop, and early reviews from two outlets were largely positive about the screen. They split on whether the touch feature adds much for most buyers.

The display uses tandem OLED, a design Apple had used before only in its iPad Pro models. Reviewers report a peak brightness of 2,000 nits for HDR content. The current Liquid Retina XDR screen on the MacBook Pro tops out at 1,600 nits, and one reviewer named 1,300 nits as the peak of the brightest Windows rival. For ordinary content, the panel holds 1,000 nits sustained. The panel also supports a variable refresh rate that reaches 120 Hz, which Apple calls ProMotion. Mashable's reviewer described it as the brightest laptop display yet made, and wrote that the colours and contrast were strong enough to make the screen hard to look at for long periods.

The touch function works, but reviewers said it adds little for most users. Touch works across macOS, but many apps lack custom touch controls, and developers will need time to adapt them. Anything you can do with the trackpad you can also do on the screen. The laptop does not support Apple Pencil or third-party styluses. One reviewer expected the touch feature to stay for now, and suggested that a matte option, similar to the Nano Texture finish Apple offers on some products, could appear later.

The body is lighter and thinner than before. Both sizes lost weight, with the 16-inch model losing more, and each got slightly thinner. The laptop also brings a feature from iPhone, the Dynamic Island, to the Mac for the first time. Reviewers also noted that the laptop runs macOS 27.

The lit logo on the lid drew the most reaction at the launch. The logo is linked to the screen brightness through software. According to iFixit's teardown, reported by The Verge, it is lit by four white LEDs, so it cannot show other colours. Users can switch the logo off with Terminal commands, or use a third-party app such as LogoLight to make it pulse or flash. The teardown also damaged the screen during removal, which shows how hard the LEDs are to reach and how costly a repair could be.

Performance was strong in Mashable's tests. The reviewer used a 16-inch review unit with 48GB of RAM and the M5 Pro chip. The machine handled 4K exports, local AI effects, a large local language model and a complex Blender project. The only task that caused clear slowdown was a large spreadsheet in Numbers. In Geekbench 7, the laptop posted the highest multi-core score in the outlet's database of more than 90 tested laptops, ahead of Macs and Windows machines with Snapdragon X2 Elite chips. The reviewer had only three days with the unit because of a shipping delay, so battery rundown tests and some standard benchmarks were not completed.

Price depends on size and configuration. According to Mashable, the 16-inch model costs $500 more than the 14-inch version. A fully configured PROLED model costs $14,549, and an upgrade to the M5 Max chip with more memory is available. The Verge refers to a $3,000 laptop in its discussion of logo repairs, which suggests the base price of the review model is in that range, but its article does not give a full price list.

Several questions remain open. Battery life has not been measured in these reviews, and the reviewers did not test the touch feature over long periods. Neither review reports how the 14-inch model performs in detail. Both outlets described the design changes, but the full effect of the touchscreen on everyday work is still unclear.