Apple Announces Its First Touchscreen MacBook
The MacBook Pro has had pretty much the same design since 2021, but today at its 'Pro and Tell' event in Cupertino, Apple has announced an all-new MacBook Pro with a touchscreen.
The new 'MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display' comes in either a 14- or 16-inch design, just like any other MacBook Pro, just with a Tandem OLED touch display with up to 128GB of RAM. But while the regular MacBook Pro 14 was updated with the M6 chip yesterday, this new touchscreen MacBook Pro will be equipped with either the M5 Pro or M5 Max, both of which will still be more powerful than Apple's new mainstream SoC.
The display is the real star of the show, though, and it should be absolutely gorgeous, coming in with up to 2,000 nits of brightness and a color gamut that covers both the P3 and Adobe RGB spectrums. Couple that with the powerful chips, and this will likely be the laptop to beat for creative professionals who are comfortable on macOS.
Touchscreen laptops have been around for a while, with Microsoft famously pushing for wide adoption of touch displays with Windows 8. At the time, though, Steve Jobs took a stand against touch displays, even claiming wholeheartedly that 'Touchscreen laptops don't work' back in 2010. But even though Apple's dad wasn't a fan of touchscreens on laptops, this isn't the first time that Apple has had 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 will get 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, and will set 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.