Touchscreen MacBook Pro with OLED is Worth for You?
Apple’s new touchscreen MacBook Pro starts at $2,900 with a tandem OLED display, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter body. Here is what changed.
Steve Jobs had a stock answer for touchscreen laptops. Vertical touch surfaces tire your arm out, he said, and they make a great demo but an ergonomically terrible daily tool. Apple repeated that position for years. Now it has announced a touchscreen MacBook Pro anyway, starting at $2,900.
The price will get the headlines, but the touchscreen is not the most interesting part of this laptop. The new display and the lower weight matter more.
What Apple actually changed
The new model comes in the same two sizes as before, 14 inches and 16 inches. Apple calls it the MacBook Pro with Pro LED XDR display, and it is slightly thinner, slightly lighter, and slightly more expensive than the model it sits beside. It is an addition to the lineup, not a replacement for the whole range. The standard MacBook Pro still exists, and this one is a new option within the family.
Under the display, most of the machine will feel familiar. The design is the same. So are the ports, the keyboard, the battery life, and the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip options. The Touch ID fingerprint reader is still in the corner of the keyboard. If you were hoping for Face ID, that did not happen. The camera area is now a dynamic island instead of a notch, but it holds only a webcam and an ambient light sensor.
The Tandem OLED display
The display is where the money goes. It is a Tandem OLED panel with a claimed contrast ratio of 10 million to 1. OLED has always been strong at deep blacks and low blooming, the halo effect that bright objects create against dark backgrounds on mini-LED screens. The previous mini-LED MacBook Pro displays were never bad, but in person this one looks better, particularly with high-contrast or HDR content.
A few smaller changes came along with it:
- The bezels are thinner, so the visible screen area is a little larger.
- The bottom corners of the display are now curved.
- The speakers were updated for deeper bass and better sound with the lid closed.
- You can choose a standard glossy finish or a matte nano-texture option.
Anyone who wanted an OLED MacBook Pro for photo editing, video work, or HDR grading now has one. That was a realistic wish for many people. The touchscreen was not.
The weight drop might be the better reason to upgrade
OLED panels don’t need a backlight, and Apple also redesigned the cooling system inside. Together those changes take real weight out of the machine. The 14-inch model drops from about 3.5 pounds to 3 pounds. The 16-inch model loses almost a full pound.
That is the kind of difference you feel if you carry a laptop around every day. Picking the new 16-inch model up next to an older one makes the gap obvious. For a lot of buyers, this is a stronger reason to upgrade than a screen they can touch.
A glowing Apple logo returns
For anyone who wants to be recognized as an owner of the new model, Apple brought back the glowing logo on the lid. When the laptop is off, the logo still has its metallic, reflective look. When it is on, the logo’s brightness follows the display’s brightness. In a dim room both are dim, and in a bright room both are bright.
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This was harder to do than it sounds. On the older mini-LED models, Apple cut a hole in the lid and let the backlight shine through, so the logo lit up for free. OLED has no backlight, so Apple had to build a separate lighting system just for the logo, and it costs a little extra battery. The new model looks different from behind, which matters to some people spending $3,000 on a machine that comes in no new colors.
How touch works on a Mac
The touchscreen itself responds quickly and works without fuss. Scrolling does what you expect. Pinch to zoom works where it should. The screen tracks all ten fingers at once, so the trackpad gestures you already know can move to the display. You can swipe four fingers across the screen to switch between Spaces, though doing that on a laptop screen feels odd.
Apple also added some touch-specific behavior:
- Spotlight and Siri now animate out of the dynamic island. You can swipe down from the top of the screen to open them, then put your hands straight back on the keyboard. Command-Space still works.
- You can grab a window and fling it to one side to fill half the screen, then fling a second window to the other side. It works much like split view on an iPad.
- Small touch targets, such as the red, yellow, and green window controls, magnify first when you reach for them. Then you tap the one you want.
Those are sensible adaptations. They make touch easier to use, but they don’t give anyone a reason to use it. A finger is still a clumsy pointer for tiny Mac interface elements, and the system has to compensate for that.
The hinge and the Apple Pencil
The most expected a major hinge redesign. Apple recently shipped the iPhone Duo with a variable-weight hinge, so a stiffer-in-the-middle hinge on the MacBook Pro seemed possible. The hinge here is only a little stiffer in the middle. A laptop lid still has to open and close easily, so it can only get so stiff, and the screen still wobbles a bit when you poke it or press the keys.
There is also no Apple Pencil support. Anyone hoping to sketch or annotate on the display is out of luck for now.
Where touch makes sense
At the launch event, most of the touchscreen demonstrations were short and occasional. Professionals showed their workflows and now and then reached up to tap the display. One played a virtual keyboard in Logic. Another turned a 3D model around. Another panned through a Gaussian splat built from iPhone footage. None of it looked like something that replaces a trackpad.
The reason is simple. Mac apps have been built for decades around a keyboard and a pointer, and most Macs still have no touchscreen. Developers will keep building for the majority of machines, so desktop software will stay keyboard and trackpad first, even on this one.
The one case that looked genuinely useful is iOS app development. In Xcode, you can bring up the iPhone simulator and tap through your app directly on the display. For developers who test iPhone apps all day, that is a real convenience.
The most impressive touch demo was a set of glowing instruments on a wall that responded in real time to input from a MacBook Pro touchscreen. It worked remarkably well and no one have never seen anything like it. It was still a demo, and Jobs’s line about great demos applies here, even if it undersells how good this one was.
A new way of shipping options
Apple has long waited on a technology until others have shipped it, then released its own polished version. This launch doesn’t follow that pattern. Other laptops have had touchscreens for years, and I have tested many of them. On most of those, I forgot the touchscreen existed because I never used it. I don’t like fingerprints on my display, I don’t like the screen wobbling when I touch it, and I don’t like holding my arm out. All of that still applies.
What Apple is doing instead is adding an option. The MacBook Pro is not rebuilt around touch. It simply has an OLED panel that happened to add no real weight or battery cost when touch was included, so Apple included it. The iPhone Duo followed the same logic. It is another version of the iPhone that suits some buyers and not others. The products were in development long before John Ternus became CEO, but the approach is now clear. Apple is offering more variants and letting buyers decide.
Should you buy it?
If you own a recent MacBook Pro, you probably don’t need to upgrade. The current generation will stay good for years. If you are shopping for a new one, you now have a harder decision, because the touchscreen model competes with its own siblings.
My view is that the touchscreen is the least compelling feature. The OLED display and the lower weight are the reasons to look at this machine. If those matter to you, the $2,900 starting price may make sense, and touch comes along as a bonus. If they don’t, the standard MacBook Pro remains a very good laptop.
