Apple has announced its first Mac with a touchscreen. The company revealed a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touch display at its "Pro and tell" event on Wednesday, ending a long stretch in which it declined to make such a laptop. CEO John Ternus presented the machine, which supports gestures such as scrolling, swiping and pinching.
Apple calls the screen a "PROLED XDR" display, a tandem OLED panel. It offers up to 2,000 nits of peak SDR brightness, a refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. The company says the touch sensor is "built directly into the display panel," not layered on top of it, which helps reduce latency. The webcam sits in a hole punch rather than a notch, and a Dynamic Island on the screen can show items such as Live Activities, much like on the iPhone.
The new laptop is lighter than its non-touch counterparts. The 14-inch model weighs as little as 3 pounds, compared with 3.4 pounds for the newly introduced M6 MacBook Pro models. The 16-inch version weighs 4 pounds, while the M5 Pro model without a touchscreen weighs 4.7 pounds. The glowing Apple logo on the lid has also returned.
Pricing starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch model. Preorders are open now, and the laptop is scheduled for release on November 6th. It is equipped with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, not the M6 chip found in the other MacBook Pros announced this week.
The move marks a reversal of long-standing company thinking. Steve Jobs famously called touchscreen laptops "ergonomically terrible," and Apple resisted building one for more than a decade. Apple has made some changes to make macOS more touch-friendly, though it is unlikely to resolve every ergonomic concern about reaching up to touch a laptop screen.
The event capped a busy week of releases. On Monday, Apple introduced a new iPad Mini with an upgraded OLED display and a thinner design. On Tuesday, it refreshed the iMac and the entry-level MacBook Pro with M6 chips, which Apple first launched in August with the Mac Mini.
The M6 is Apple's first 2nm chip and includes a dual 16-core Neural Engine. Apple says the M6 iMac delivers up to 5x faster on-device AI performance than the M4 model. The iMac starts at $1,499 and looks largely unchanged. It arrives two years after the M4 overhaul, so the M5 generation was skipped on that machine entirely.
The launches continue a run of product news since Ternus became CEO on September 1st. Recent releases have included the iPhone 18 Pro, new Apple Watches, the AirPods 5 and the HomePod Mini 2. The event also followed the debut of the HomeView smart display and the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable, announced a little over a month ago.
