Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display becomes first touchscreen Mac

Apple breaks decades of tradition by finally adding a touchscreen to a MacBook, pairing it with tandem OLED tech and M5 Pro and M5 Max silicon

“The Mac has never been better, and never been stronger,” said Apple CEO John Ternus, introducing the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, in a crisp keynote. The proverbial saving the best for the last. In a week of rolling product launches, Apple has unveiled what is finally a MacBook with a touchscreen. The name’s long: the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, and it is the latest addition to the Mac portfolio.

John Ternus, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during an event in Los Angeles, California, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 28. (Bloomberg)

It follows generational refreshes for the iPad mini with the A20 Pro chip, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip and also the iMac with M6 chips, earlier this week. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display will be available in 14-inch and 16-inch display sizes with choices of the M5 Pro or M5 Max chips in different states of tune and configurations.

Prices start at ₹3,49,900 for the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. For comparison, the MacBook Pro with M6 is priced ₹2,39,900 onwards factoring in inflation with bill of materials due to increased component costs across the board with computing tech.

“The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is a monumental step forward for the Mac,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “PROLED XDR is the world’s best laptop display. It pairs state-of-the-art tandem OLED technology with advanced algorithms in our display engine to deliver the kind of visual fidelity pros have been dreaming of. And with the magic of Touch coming to MacBook Pro, combined with the game-changing performance of M5 Pro and M5 Max, we’ve created a whole new way for pros to interact with their content, taking their workflows to a completely new level.”

Apple’s technical details indicate the PROLED XDR Display benchmarks a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

Apple insists that a touchscreen with macOS opens a new dimension for workflows, allowing apps to add new functionality. It will be interesting to see how apps integrate touch for macOS, and how close to the experience gets to the iPadOS and perhaps even iOS on the larger real estate of the iPhone Duo’s foldable main screen. Three key gestures—scroll, zoom and draw—are already available across apps.

“The new MacBook Pro is the result of the deep integration between Apple silicon, hardware, and software, and there’s simply nothing else like it,” Srouji adds.

This is a tandem OLED display with Touch and Dynamic Island that is rated at 2,000 nits of peak brightness. Tandem OLED is a display technology that stacks multiple organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emission layers on top of each other inside a single panel, rather than using a single light-emitting layer like traditional OLED screens. This means the illumination workload is spread across multiple layers, which should theoretically improve efficiency and longevity due to less stress on a single panel.

Apple’s technical document on the PROLED XDR Display indicates that benchmarks peg this to a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. A precision transistor layer is integrated, with an industry-first full oxide transistor layer that balances the illumination of each pixel. Apple added what they call a stiffener behind the back glass to eliminate mechanical distortion that can bend light in a large OLED.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display can be configured with an M5 Pro chip with up to 64GB unified memory and 4TB SSD storage, while the M5 Max variants can be configured with up to 128GB unified memory and 16TB SSD. It is a similar configuration chart for the 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display for specs.

Apple says the M5 Pro variant’s 100-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery will last 24 hours of continuous video streaming, while the M5 Max which also gets a similar 100-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery will last up to 22 hours under the same usage scenario.

A touchscreen MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display finally gives Apple direct parity with Windows PCs, many of which have had touchscreens for more than a decade, albeit with varying experiences with the Windows operating system. Apple will do well to avoid the issues Windows 8 and subsequently Windows 11 have faced regarding touch-based navigation. Apple’s computing device portfolio including the iPad Pro range now has touchscreen parity, which should be good news for app developers.