Apple's First Touchscreen Mac Is a $2,899 MacBook Pro With an OLED Screen

Apple's first touchscreen Mac is a MacBook Pro, and it starts at $2,899.

What this means for you: If you want to touch the screen of a Mac, this is the only one, and the cheapest version costs $900 more than the 14-inch MacBook Pro Apple announced yesterday. Pre-orders are open, and the first ones arrive Friday, November 6.

Apple unveiled the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display today during its "Pro and tell" event, and we're following the rest of the show in our live feed. It comes in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes with an M5 Pro or M5 Max chip. The 14-inch M5 Pro is $2,899 and the 16-inch is $3,399. With the M5 Max, the 14-inch is $4,499 and the 16-inch is $4,799. Students and teachers pay $2,749 for the cheapest one.

Touch is the headline, and Apple built the sensor into the display panel itself instead of laying it on top, and it added video stabilization so your camera feed doesn't shake when you tap the screen during a call. Scrolling, pinching to zoom and dragging slides between presentations all work with a finger. Most apps work today because macOS turns a tap into a click, but Apple's footnote puts the Touch updates for Microsoft Office, Zoom, Lightroom and Blender later this year.

The screen is new too. Apple calls it PROLED XDR, a tandem OLED panel with two layers of lit pixels. It reaches up to 2,000 nits at its brightest, runs at up to 120Hz and has a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It adds Adobe RGB, which print designers and photographers use, alongside P3 color, and there's an optional nano-texture finish to cut glare. All of that is Apple's description. We haven't used it yet.

The Dynamic Island, the pill-shaped spot at the top of the iPhone screen, now lives on the Mac as the home for Spotlight search, Live Activities and Siri AI. You can accept an AirDrop request or pause a song with one tap.

Inside, the machine goes up to 128GB of memory and 16TB of storage. The 14-inch weighs 3 pounds, half a pound less than before, and the 16-inch weighs 4 pounds. Apple rates the battery at up to 24 hours. The ports are three Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, an SD card slot, MagSafe charging and a headphone jack.

Next to the 14-inch M6 MacBook Pro from our story on the M6 Mac lineup, the 14-inch PROLED model looks like this, and every cell comes from Apple's pages.

One caution on the battery row. Apple's footnote for the PROLED 24-hour figure names a 16-inch M5 Pro as the test machine, and we didn't find a separate 14-inch number.

Who should buy which

Most people should buy the M6 and keep the $900. The screen size, the battery rating and the port lineup all match apart from the faster Thunderbolt 5 on the PROLED model, so school, office work, photo editing at home and a lot of everyday travel are perfectly fine on the cheaper laptop.

The PROLED model fits people who edit video, photos or print work for a living and want the best screen Apple sells, or who draw, make music or build 3D models and want their hands on the display. It's also 0.4 pounds lighter. The starting 14-inch PROLED model has 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage, against 16GB and 1TB for the M6.

How to pre-order

Go to apple.com/store or open the Apple Store app, pick a size, chip, color, memory and storage, and check out. Pre-orders are open in 30 countries and regions, including the U.S., and Apple also lists a lease from $55.99 a month for 36 months on the $2,899 model, plus trade-in credit if you have an old Mac to hand over.

Machines start arriving at homes, Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Resellers on Friday, November 6.

References

• Source: Apple Newsroom: Apple unveils groundbreaking MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
• Source: Apple: MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
• Source: Apple Store: Buy MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
• Source: Apple: Compare Mac models
• Source: Apple Newsroom: Apple introduces the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6
• Source: Apple: MacBook Pro tech specs (M6 model)