Apple announces its first touchscreen MacBook Pro

Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro laptop with an OLED touchscreen at its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday. It starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model, or $3,399 for the 16-inch version, and will be available starting November 6th.

The new MacBook Pro has what Apple calls a “ProLED XDR” display, which is a tandem OLED screen. It offers up to 2,000 nits of brightness, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It’s equipped with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips — not the M6 chip on the other MacBook Pros announced this week. There’s a Dynamic Island on the screen that can show you things like Live Activities, similar to what’s available on iPhones. And the glowing Apple logo on the lid has returned.

The 14-inch model weighs 3 pounds, and the 16-inch model weighs 4 pounds, according to Apple. The laptop also offers “up to” 24 hours of battery life.

As for ports, it has a MagSafe 3 port, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, an HDMI port, and three Thunderbolt 5 ports. The laptop also supports three external displays simultaneously or four if you get an M5 Max version.

Until now, Apple has long resisted the idea of a touchscreen laptop. On a 2012 earnings call, former CEO Tim Cook, responding to a question about why he doesn’t think the tablet and laptop will 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 called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible.” Apple tried replacing the function keys with the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros starting in 2016, but it went back to physical function keys with the 2021 MacBook Pro redesign and fully dropped the Touch Bar in 2023.

The new laptop follows what’s been a busy week of Apple announcements, including an iPad Mini with an OLED display and M6-powered iMacs.

Developing…

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