Apple Announces Its First Touchscreen MacBook

The MacBook Pro has retained essentially the same design since 2021, but today at its ‘Pro and Tell’ event in Cupertino, Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro featuring a touchscreen.

The new ‘MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display’ is available in either a 14- or 16-inch design, like any other MacBook Pro, but with a Tandem OLED touch display and up to 128GB of RAM. While the regular MacBook Pro 14 was updated yesterday with the M6 chip, this new touchscreen MacBook Pro will be powered by either the M5 Pro or M5 Max, both of which will remain more powerful than Apple’s new mainstream SoC.

The display is the true star of the show, though, and should be absolutely gorgeous, offering up to 2,000 nits of brightness and a color gamut covering both the P3 and Adobe RGB spectrums. Paired with the powerful chips, this will likely become the laptop to beat for creative professionals comfortable on macOS.

Apple MacBook Pro With PROLED XDR Display – Photos

Touchscreen laptops have existed for a while, with Microsoft famously pushing for widespread adoption of touch displays with Windows 8. At the time, though, Steve Jobs took a stand against touch displays, even wholeheartedly claiming that ‘Touchscreen laptops don’t work’ back in 2010. But even though Apple’s late co-founder was no fan of touchscreens on laptops, this isn’t the first time Apple has put a touch display on a MacBook, at least if you count the controversial touch bar on the MacBook Pro in the late 2010s.

However, it’s clear that the RAM crisis has hit Apple as well. The new Touchscreen MacBook Pro costs an eye-watering $2,899 just to get in the door, which gets you the M5 Pro with a 15-core CPU and a 16-core GPU, along with 24GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The 16-inch model is even more expensive, setting you back $3,399 to start, with a slightly more powerful M5 Pro configuration, along with the same 24GB RAM and 1TB SSD.

Of course, because it’s a MacBook, you can absolutely max this thing out if you have the budget for it. Apple will let you spec the 16-inch model with an M5 Max, with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU, along with 128GB of RAM and a 16TB SSD for $14,399. Though, that kind of configuration would be absolutely overkill unless you’re editing 4K footage every day, and constantly leave your external drive at home.

If you want to get your hands on the new MacBook Pro With PROLED XDR Display, you can preorder it today, and it will show up on store shelves on November 6.

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Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra