The touchscreen MacBook Pro is a winner

I keep forgetting the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has a touchscreen. I’ve been testing this new laptop, one of the most impressive Apple has ever created, for the better part of a week. I can’t stop noticing some of its other features: the slimmer design, the improved display, the Dynamic Island that somehow catches my eye more than the notch ever did. But I keep forgetting that as I go about my day, I can now reach out and poke the screen.

Come to think of it, that might be exactly what Apple intended. Steve Jobs said touch laptops were a bad idea; some subset of users demanded one anyway. Now the MacBook Pro has one. But not in a way that meaningfully changes the laptop experience. There have been a few times I have found the touchscreen genuinely useful, better or more intuitive than anything I could do with a trackpad or a mouse. But to call this “the touchscreen MacBook Pro” just doesn’t feel right. It’s the latest evolution of Apple’s most powerful laptop — and oh, it happens to have a touchscreen.

Very little about this laptop, or my experience with it, will come as a surprise. That’s a good thing; the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display (which I will just be calling the PROLED Pro from now on, because ugh, the name) comes with a bunch of new upgrades but no new problems, and performs as well as you’d expect from a laptop this expensive. Combine the screen, the body, and the touch, and you have something like a new generation of MacBook Pro. It’s going to be a good one.

The 14-inch PROLED Pro starts at $2,899, and the 16-inch at $3,399. Both come with either an M5 Pro or M5 Max chip, each with two configurations to choose from, plus a bunch of RAM and storage options. It’s a lot of options! (My review unit is a 14-inch model with an M5 Pro chip that has 18 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, plus 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Total cost: $3,699.) In general, this device runs about a $400 premium over the standard, similarly specced Pro, but spoiler alert: I think it’s worth it, touchscreen or no touchscreen.

If you buy the fully loaded PROLED Pro with the beefiest M5 Max chip, nano-texture glass, 128GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage — at a whopping $14,549 — you are my hero. And I have some questions.

My middle-of-the-road PROLED configuration benchmarks almost exactly in line with other devices running an M5 Pro, such as the most recent Mac Mini. One simple way to think about Apple’s M-series chips is that the cores get faster with every generation, and you get a bunch of additional cores (and faster memory) with the Pro and Max chips. So on a single-core, one-task benchmark, the M5 Pro comes in slightly behind most M6 devices, even much cheaper ones. But as you get to more complex computing tasks, particularly anything involving the GPU, the M5 Pro and Max brute-force their way to better performance.

That means the M5 Pro and Max suit anyone doing heavily graphical work or local AI development. The tests prove these laptops are very fast, which we already knew. They also prove they’re just as fast despite being inside a machine that’s smaller and thinner, which is not always a given. Apple says it redesigned the thermals inside the laptop both to accommodate the new design and to direct heat away from the OLED display, which can degrade or even fail if it gets too hot for too long. The Pro’s fans always seem to turn on before the laptop even gets a little hot — that’s clearly deliberate on Apple’s part.

As for the OLED itself, it’s gorgeous. The slimmer bezels and smaller cutout make it loom even larger and more central in the laptop; it has almost that iPad-like, “magic pane of glass” feel. It’s sharp and contrast-y, gets both very bright (though it only hits peak brightness under very specific conditions) and very dim, and is better even than the very good screens on Apple’s other laptops. Visual professionals will need, and appreciate, the fidelity to P3 and Adobe’s RGB color spaces; the rest of us will probably most notice just how much more dramatic the blacks look as we play games or watch movies. I generally live in dark mode, and it looks even better on this machine.

One theme of Apple’s recent product launches has been how much thinner an OLED display is than an LCD, and what that means for the product as a whole. What it means, mostly, is that the Apple logo can glow again. But also, just as OLED made it possible for the iPad Mini to shrink even more, the PROLED Pro is smaller than its predecessors by an impressive margin. My 14-inch model is a fraction of an inch smaller in every dimension than the standard MacBook Pro, which is always a good thing, but the half-pound weight decrease (more than two-thirds of a pound on the 16-inch model!) is what really impresses me. At 3 pounds on the dot, the 14-inch PROLED Pro is closer in weight to the 15-inch MacBook Air than the 14-inch MacBook Pro. It still feels solid and dense, but I appreciate the slimmer build every time I pick it up or toss it in my backpack.

The only small downside of this new design, at least to my ears, is the speakers. The Pro’s built-in speakers have always been impressive, but I find the new model a bit bass-heavy and roomy. Everything sounds like it’s playing in a large, empty warehouse. Still, these are better speakers than you’ll find in almost any other laptop.

Most of the rest of the hardware hasn’t changed. Same three Thunderbolt 5 ports, same HDMI and SD card access, same headphone jack, same keyboard, same trackpad. Even the battery life seems about the same: I get through a pretty heavy workday with a third or more of the battery left. I would always like more ports, especially on a device with this much raw multitasking power, but this appears to be the selection Apple is going with.

Give it a year or two, and I suspect every model in the MacBook Pro lineup will look like this. The OLED display, and the smaller and lighter laptop it enables, are such obvious upgrades that Apple would be silly not to bring them to other devices. Do you need to pay the $400 premium just to get them right now? Probably not. But next time you’re in the market for a MacBook, get one with the new screen and the new look.

So far, we’ve talked about a bunch of things that add up to a better MacBook Pro. If there’s a big new idea about computing in here, it’s the PROLED Pro’s touch support. For the first time ever, the Mac has a touchscreen. The mental model for that touchscreen is very simple: It’s a mouse emulator. When you tap on the screen, the Pro registers it like you’ve clicked the mouse or trackpad. In theory, this should work everywhere; in practice, it works almost everywhere. In a few instances, in particular while playing games, I’ve encountered a button that simply would not respond to touch. And since there’s no touch equivalent to hovering your cursor over a notification or icon, there are a few things you just can’t do with a tap. I can swipe away a notification with a tap, but I can’t make the X appear in the corner to quickly dismiss it.

Apple made a couple of tiny changes to macOS to accommodate touch, like the automatically expanding traffic lights for managing windows, but that’s about it. If developers choose, they can add all sorts of other touch controls to their apps, allowing you to use multiple fingers at a time or do complicated movements you never could on a touchpad. There’s very little of that now, of course, and I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon. Given that only this one top-of-the-line model supports touch, only the pro-est of pro apps are likely to find it worthwhile to support this Pro.

For as long as we’ve been talking about touch Macs, the obvious problem has always been that macOS is not suited to touch. All the buttons are small! I might tap the wrong things! I am here to tell you that all those worries are both entirely correct and largely irrelevant. It makes no sense to use touch as a primary navigational tool on the Mac, to constantly move your hands back and forth between screen and palmrest. And so you won’t. You won’t tap between Excel cells, either, or start dramatically swiping through your email. Even if you love the touchscreen, you’ll use it a lot for a day or so and go back to using your laptop almost exactly the way you did before.

The Dynamic Island is a good example. I like having both the Dynamic Island and Live Activities on the Mac — it’s easier to control music from there than to find my open Spotify tab, and I like seeing sports scores while I’m working. But I never tap the thing. Technically, you can get to Siri by swiping down from the Dynamic Island (though dragging with the trackpad doesn’t work for some reason), but I never do that. It’s so much more work, and half the time I end up accidentally moving an app window instead. Even a feature borrowed from a touch device works better with a mouse on this device.

That’s not to say the touchscreen doesn’t come in handy, though. It does more often than I expected. When I’m editing photos, reaching out and spreading my fingers to zoom in on the section I want to see is vastly easier than clicking and dragging with the trackpad. When I’m watching a movie, I can just tap the video rather than wiggling the mouse to find the cursor. My favorite touch use so far has been when I’m showing somebody something on my computer — now we can both swipe between options or tap to make an edit rather than having to crowd around the trackpad.

That all adds up to maybe a half-dozen taps on the touchscreen a day. Which I think is plenty. I tried, very briefly, to use the PROLED Pro like a touch-first device, and found it essentially impossible. There’s no onscreen keyboard that appears when you tap a text box; you don’t get the copy / paste / select all pop-up when you tap on words. No radius of tools appears when you tap the Apple Pencil on the screen in Procreate, because, oh wait, the Apple Pencil doesn’t work at all. You can tap on the Dynamic Island to control the currently playing music, or swipe from the edge to see your notifications and widgets, but those are the most touchscreen-native things about this computer.

You can see where this all might go if Apple decides to make touch a truly core part of the MacBook. You’d want a laptop with a more flexible hinge so you can flip the device around into more touch-friendly positions. You’d want all the Mac’s system interfaces to be a little bigger and easier to tap. You’d want apps to be very Mac-ish and very iPad-ish all at the same time. You’d spend the rest of your life wiping fingerprints off the screen. Frankly, I don’t think I want any of those things. I don’t think Apple wants them either. Ultimately, the PROLED MacBook is just not a touchscreen laptop. It’s a laptop that happens to have a touchscreen.

Since Apple first announced the PROLED Pro, I’ve heard from and read about a lot of people who have been waiting for this upgrade. If you bought a MacBook Pro in the last couple of years, I don’t think you need to throw your computer in the trash and buy this one instead. (Though I’ve heard Apple is offering pretty hefty trade-ins right now…) If you bought, say, a model from the M1 generation, I’d bet that laptop is holding up just fine but maybe beginning to show its age. If that’s you, and you want a new computer that’s going to last you just as long as the last one did, the PROLED Pro is the one to get. If this is really what the future of MacBook looks like, we’re in for a generation of fabulous laptops — whether you want to touch the screen or not.