In October 2010, standing on stage at Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event, Steve Jobs explained why there would never be a touchscreen Mac. “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical,” he said. “It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
Sixteen years later, Apple is selling one. At its “Pro and Tell” press event on October 28, the company announced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen and its first laptop with an OLED panel. As UNILAD Tech noted, the reaction online has been split between people who never wanted to touch a laptop screen and people thrilled about a much smaller detail: the Apple logo on the lid glows again.
The short version
- Apple’s first touchscreen Mac comes in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips and a tandem OLED display rated up to 2,000 nits.
- Prices start at $2,899 (14-inch) and $3,399 (16-inch), $400 more than the non-touch M5 Pro models, which stay on sale.
- Preorders are open now; deliveries and in-store availability start Friday, November 6.
- The notch is gone, replaced by a Dynamic Island, and the glowing Apple logo returns for the first time since 2016.
- macOS 27 adds touch gestures and larger tap targets, but Apple still treats the keyboard and trackpad as the main way to use a Mac.
What Apple announced
The new MacBook Pro uses a two-layer “tandem” OLED panel, made by Samsung Display according to MacRumors, with the touch sensor built into the panel itself. Apple rates it at up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, compared with 1,600 nits HDR and 1,000 nits SDR on the mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display it sits beside in the lineup. ProMotion still runs from 10Hz to 120Hz. Tom’s Guide called the screen “jaw-dropping” and said it was bright enough that they had to turn down their camera exposure to film it.
The chips are the same M5 Pro and M5 Max that launched in the March MacBook Pros, so this is a display and design upgrade, not a performance leap. Apple says it redesigned the hinge so the screen doesn’t wobble when you tap it, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported reworked cooling that moves air through the hinge area. Both models are a little thinner and noticeably lighter than the current ones, at about 3 pounds for the 14-inch and 4 pounds for the 16-inch, per The Mac Observer. The notch is replaced by a Dynamic Island, the iPhone-style pill that expands to show activity.
| Spec | MacBook Pro, PROLED XDR (Oct 2026) | MacBook Pro, M5 Pro (Mar 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Display | Tandem OLED touchscreen | Mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR, no touch |
| Peak brightness | 2,000 nits HDR and SDR | 1,600 nits HDR, 1,000 nits SDR |
| Chips | M5 Pro or M5 Max | M5 Pro or M5 Max |
| Top of screen | Dynamic Island | Notch |
| Weight (14 / 16-inch) | About 3.0 lb / 4.0 lb | About 3.5 lb / 4.7 lb |
| Lid logo | Glowing | Polished metal |
| Ports | 3x Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, SDXC, MagSafe 3, headphone jack | Same |
| Starting price (14 / 16-inch) | $2,899 / $3,399 | $2,499 / $2,999 |
How touch works in macOS 27
Apple isn’t turning the Mac into an iPad. Gurman’s long-running description, “touch-friendly, not touch-first,” fits what Apple showed. In macOS 27 you can scroll and swipe with a finger, pinch to zoom, use gestures to arrange windows, and tap buttons and menus that grow larger when your finger approaches. Apple pitches it as a third input alongside the keyboard and trackpad, useful for things like “manipulating 3D models to playing musical instruments onscreen.” AppleInsider’s verdict was that macOS is changing “only a bit.” We couldn’t confirm Apple Pencil support or Face ID, so assume neither until Apple’s spec page says otherwise.
Early hands-on impressions have been warmer than the internet. TechRadar said touching the screen “feels totally and wonderfully natural” and that “my arm never got tired,” which reads like a direct answer to Jobs. Engadget called it “both familiar and radically improved.” The skeptics have their own evidence: replies to Apple CEO John Ternus’s launch post were full of photos of fingerprint-smudged screens.
The real crowd-pleaser is on the back
Ternus clearly knew which feature would land. “We’re glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro,” he wrote on X. “You’ve gotta touch it to believe it.” One fan’s reply, quoted by UNILAD, summed up the mood: “My theory is Apple knows most of the hardcore pro users would never use a touchscreen Mac but we’d instantly open our wallets for a glowing Apple logo on the lid.”
The old glowing logo was a happy accident of LCD design. It was a translucent cutout in the lid that let the display’s backlight shine through, first seen on the PowerBook G3 “Lombard” in 1999. As lids got thinner, Apple dropped it, starting with the 12-inch MacBook in 2015, the same machine Apple just declared obsolete, followed by the MacBook Pro in 2016. OLED panels have no backlight at all, so the new logo needs its own light source. AppleInsider reports its brightness tracks the screen’s, and when it’s off, the logo looks like ordinary polished metal.
Sources: Fortune, Wired via Business Insider, MacRumors, AppleInsider, Digital Trends.
Jobs wasn’t the only holdout. Software chief Craig Federighi told reporters as recently as 2018 that he was “not into touchscreens” on the Mac, and that reaching up to the screen is “pretty fatiguing.” Tim Cook once compared touchscreen laptops to combining “a toaster and a refrigerator.” Apple’s halfway step, the Touch Bar strip above the keyboard, arrived in 2016 and was gone from the lineup by late 2023.
What it costs, and the fine print on that “$400 more”
The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 with an M5 Pro, 24GB of memory and a 1TB SSD; the 16-inch starts at $3,399. M5 Max versions start at $4,499 and $4,799, and MacRumors found that maxed-out configurations reach $14,249 and $14,549. Education pricing knocks $150 to $300 off. Preorders opened October 28 in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries beginning November 6.
The “$400 more” figure needs a footnote. It’s measured against today’s prices for the non-touch M5 Pro models, $2,499 and $2,999. Those machines actually launched in March at $2,199 and $2,699, and Apple raised them in June, citing memory costs. So compared with what the regular MacBook Pro cost at launch this spring, the touch model is $700 more. The non-touch versions remain on sale for now, though Gurman expects the mini-LED models to be phased out eventually.
If touch isn’t the point for you, Apple also announced a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the new M6 chip a day earlier, starting at $1,999 with a notch and no touchscreen. That’s the more sensible pick for most buyers. The PROLED model is for people who want the best screen Apple makes, and are fine paying a premium to be first, the same calculation buyers made with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, earlier this month.
Can it turn Mac sales around?
Apple needs some excitement in laptops. IDC’s preliminary numbers show Mac shipments fell 11.3% year over year in the third quarter to 5.9 million, even as Apple’s share of a PC market that shrank about 20% rose to 9.5%. A $2,899 starting price won’t move volume the way the $699 MacBook Neo did, but a halo product doesn’t have to. It has to get people into stores and talking about Macs, and the glowing logo is doing that already.
Sources and further reading
- UNILAD Tech: Apple announces first-ever touchscreen MacBook
- 9to5Mac: Apple announces redesigned MacBook Pro, its first touchscreen Mac
- The Mac Observer: MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display specs
- MacRumors: Which touchscreen MacBook Pro rumors were right
- MacRumors: What a maxed-out new MacBook Pro costs
- Digital Trends: How to preorder the touchscreen MacBook Pro
- AppleInsider: How macOS is changing on touchscreens
- AppleInsider: The glowing Apple logo makes a return
- Tom’s Guide: MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR hands-on
- TechRadar: Touching a MacBook screen feels natural
- Engadget: Apple’s first touchscreen MacBook Pro hands-on
- TechCrunch: Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro pushes laptop pricing to a new extreme
- 9to5Mac: Apple raises Mac and iPad prices
- Fortune: Back to the Mac live blog (2010)
- 9to5Mac: IDC says Mac shipments dropped 11% in Q3
- TechCrunch: Apple unveils 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6
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