Apple Puts a Touchscreen on the MacBook Pro for the First Time, With a Tandem OLED Display From $2,899

The redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch laptops add a PROLED XDR screen, a Dynamic Island and M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, and shed up to 0.7 pounds. They ship Nov. 6.

LOS ANGELES - Apple on Wednesday introduced a redesigned MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, reversing a position its leaders held for more than a decade. The new 14-inch and 16-inch models use what Apple calls a PROLED XDR display, a tandem OLED panel, and run on the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch. Pre-orders opened on Wednesday in 30 countries and regions, and the laptops arrive in stores and with customers on Friday, Nov. 6, Apple said in its announcement, timed to its “Pro and tell” event in Los Angeles.

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. Image: Apple

Touch is the headline. Apple says the touch sensor is built into the display panel itself rather than layered on top, which it credits with lower latency. Users can swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom, double-tap a window to fill the screen or flick it to tile it into place. Many existing apps work right away because macOS translates touches into clicks, and Apple says updated gesture APIs let developers build features designed for touch. A redesigned hinge is meant to keep the screen steady under a finger. Apple’s own pitch leans on professional work: drawing across the whole display instead of the trackpad, playing software instruments on screen in Logic Pro, and testing iPhone and iPad apps directly on the laptop.

The Dynamic Island on the Mac holds Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. Image: Apple

The display is the other half of the story. Apple rates the tandem OLED panel at up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a variable refresh rate from 10Hz to 120Hz. It covers both the P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces, which Apple says works out to more than 80 percent of Rec. 2020. Slimmer borders grow the screens to 14.2 inches and 16.3 inches, and a nano-texture option is now etched directly into the cover glass. The Dynamic Island, familiar from the iPhone, comes to the Mac at the top of the display, where it holds Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. Apple notes that Spotlight moves there only when Siri AI is available and turned on.

Screenshot: @johnternus on X, Oct. 28, 2026 Screenshot: @johnternus on X

“We’re glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro. You’ve gotta touch it to believe it,” John Ternus, Apple’s chief executive, wrote on X. The pun was deliberate: the glowing Apple logo is back on the lid, The Verge reported. Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, called the laptop “a monumental step forward for the Mac” in the company’s release.

The machines are also lighter, which matters for a laptop that many owners carry every day. The 14-inch model now weighs 3 pounds, half a pound less than before, and the 16-inch model weighs 4 pounds, 0.7 pounds less. Apple says the more efficient OLED stack makes the 16-inch model nearly a millimeter thinner and the 14-inch model half a millimeter thinner, and that a rebuilt thermal design keeps the same sustained performance. Battery life is rated at up to 24 hours, and the laptops can reach 50 percent charge in 30 minutes.

The 16-inch model weighs 4 pounds and the 14-inch model 3 pounds. Image: Apple

Inside, the touch models use M5 Pro and M5 Max rather than the M6 chip Apple put in the $1,999 14-inch MacBook Pro on Tuesday. Configurations reach 128GB of unified memory and, for the first time, 16TB of storage. Apple says M5 Max can run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the device. The six-speaker system gets a new woofer that Apple says delivers 50 percent deeper bass, along with a tuning mode for when the lid is closed and the laptop is driving an external monitor.

Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe and a headphone jack. Image: Apple

The ports stay generous: three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe and a headphone jack. M5 Pro models drive up to three external displays and M5 Max models up to four. Apple’s N1 wireless chip supplies Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and the 12-megapixel Center Stage camera now stabilizes video automatically when the user is touching the screen during a call.

Video: Apple / YouTube

The price ladder climbs quickly. M5 Max versions start at $4,499 for the 14-inch model and $4,799 for the 16-inch. Education pricing starts at $2,749 and $3,199 for the M5 Pro models. The laptops ship with macOS 27, and Apple says touch support is coming to third-party apps including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender and Canva later this year.

Playing a software keyboard on screen in Logic Pro. Image: Apple

The reversal is striking. Steve Jobs called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, The Verge noted, and Tim Cook compared merging a tablet and a laptop to converging “a toaster and a refrigerator” on a 2012 earnings call. Apple’s closest attempt since was the Touch Bar, a thin touch strip above the keyboard that it introduced in 2016 and dropped entirely in 2023. This time the whole screen responds, and the trackpad and keyboard stay exactly where they were. Techtember reported on Oct. 5 that Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman expected the touchscreen MacBook Pro to be “significantly lighter.” On that point, at least, the reporting held up.