Apple revealed today redesigned versions of its 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with touch-enabled OLED displays and the same Dynamic Island interface seen on recent iPhone models. These new MacBook Pros with PROLED XDR Displays are available with the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that launched on the MacBook Pro models from March 2026, but the other hardware improvements will come at a premium.
As you probably know, Apple dismissed touchscreen laptops for a long time. When Apple introduced the redesigned MacBook Air back in 2010, the late Steve Jobs claimed that “touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives a great demo, but after a short period of time, your arm starts to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
Well, sixteen years later, Apple finally agreed that touchscreens can make sense on laptops, and the company optimized macOS 27 for touch input. Fortunately, the company knows how to optimize operating systems for touch with everything it learned from designing iPhones and iPads.
“Everyday tasks are simple and intuitive, allowing users to scroll through a webpage with a natural swipe; pinch to zoom in on a photo; drag and drop slides from one presentation to another; and double-tap a window to fill the screen, or flick to tile it into place. And the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel — not layered on top of it — reducing latency so users feel like they’re touching the content itself,” Apple explained today.
Users of these new MacBook Pros will see that Apple apps are already optimized for touch input, and most apps should work with Touch right away as macOS automatically translates touches into clicks. Apple also updated its system gesture APIs to allow developers to optimize their apps for this new input method.
The PROLED XDR Displays on these new MacBook Pros leverage a unique tandem OLED technology with advanced algorithms to deliver the best picture quality. “The display engine precisely controls the color and luminance of every pixel at the sub-millisecond level, compensating for content, pixel use, temperature, and environment all at once to offer exceptional brightness uniformity and grayscale accuracy, even in fast-motion content. It also monitors and adapts each pixel’s usage over time to preserve stunning image quality,” Apple emphasized today.
Apple’s PROLED XDR displays offer 2000 nits of peak brightness, and they also support a color gamut with P3 and Adobe RGB. The small Dynamic Island interface at the top can display Live Activities, media controls, AirDrop requests, and Spotlight search, and the hidden 12MP Center Stage camera gained support for advanced video stabilization.
These new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro both come with a redesigned six-speaker audio system delivering 50% deeper bass. Both models are also slightly slimmer and lighter, and Apple also trimmed the display borders, resulting in a larger 16.3-inch viewing area on the bigger model.
Under the hood, the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips on these new MacBook Pros are identical to the ones Apple used in the refreshed MacBook Pros from March 2026. However, M5 Max versions of MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Displays can now be configured with up to 16TB of SSD storage.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and an M5 Pro chip starts at $2,899, and the M5 Max version starts at $4,499. The 16-inch model, however, starts at $3,399 for the M5 Pro version, while the M5 Max version starts at $4,799. All models are available ot pre-order today, and they will start shipping on November 6.