Apple Unveils First Touchscreen MacBook Pro, Reversing Years of Resistance

Apple has introduced a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen for the first time, revealing the machine on Wednesday at its "Pro and tell" event. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch version at $3,399. Preorders are open now, and the laptops are scheduled to be released on November 6.

The company calls the display "PROLED XDR," a tandem OLED panel. Apple lists up to 2,000 nits of peak SDR brightness, a refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a contrast ratio of 10,000,000:1. The machines run on M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, rather than the M6 chip used in other MacBook Pros announced this week.

A Dynamic Island now sits on the screen and can show items such as Live Activities, much as it does on iPhones. The glowing Apple logo on the lid, absent in recent models, has also returned.

According to Apple, the touch sensor is built "directly into the display panel" instead of being layered on top, which the company says lowers latency. Beyond basic actions like scrolling a webpage or zooming into a photo, Apple points to uses such as testing iOS and iPadOS apps on the display and playing software instruments on screen. The company says its own apps are optimized for touch, and an updated API will let outside developers add touch support to theirs.

The design has also changed. Apple says the 14-inch model weighs 3 pounds and the 16-inch model 4 pounds. The 16-inch version is "nearly a millimeter" thinner than before, while the 14-inch is half a millimeter thinner. Slimmer bezels allowed larger screens: 14.2 inches on the smaller model and 16.3 inches on the larger one.

Battery life is rated at "up to" 24 hours. Ports include MagSafe 3, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, HDMI and three Thunderbolt 5 connections. The laptop can drive three external displays at once, or four with an M5 Max configuration. Apple also cites a six-speaker sound system with "50 percent deeper bass and remarkable sound clarity," along with a newly designed hinge for added stability.

The move marks a turnaround. On a 2012 earnings call, then-CEO Tim Cook, asked why he did not expect tablets and laptops to converge, said, "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user." In 2010, Steve Jobs described touchscreen laptops as "ergonomically terrible."

Apple has experimented with alternative input before. It replaced function keys with the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros starting in 2016, returned to physical function keys in the 2021 redesign, and fully dropped the Touch Bar in 2023.

The laptop arrives after a busy week of Apple announcements that also included an iPad Mini with an OLED display and iMacs powered by the M6 chip.