Apple’s new MacBook Pro adds touch and a 10,000,000:1 OLED screen, from $2,899

Apple has introduced a MacBook Pro that, for the first time, responds to touch. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display pairs a tandem OLED screen with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Pre-orders start today, October 28, at $2,899.

Touch, tandem OLED and a Dynamic Island on the Mac

The 14- and 16-inch models use what Apple calls a tandem OLED panel with two self-illuminating pixel layers. Apple lists up to 2000 nits peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, a contrast ratio of 10,000,000:1, and adaptive refresh from 10Hz to 120Hz. The panel covers both P3 and Adobe RGB, and Apple says it exceeds 80 percent of Rec. 2020. A nano-texture option is etched into the cover glass.

The touch sensor is built into the display panel rather than layered on top, which Apple says lowers latency. macOS translates touches into clicks, so existing apps should respond right away, and updated gesture APIs let developers build touch-specific features. Apple names Notion, Canva, Zoom, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Maxon Cinema 4D and ZBrush, Shapr3D and Algoriddim djay Pro as apps that will use it. A redesigned hinge is meant to keep the screen steady while it is touched.

The Dynamic Island, familiar from the iPhone, arrives on the Mac as the home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. The laptops ship with macOS 27, which Apple says includes Siri AI and Apple Intelligence features across apps.

Weight drops to 3 pounds for the 14-inch model and 4 pounds for the 16-inch, which Apple says is 0.7 pounds lighter than before. Apple quotes up to 24 hours of battery life, and storage can now be configured up to 16TB. Memory goes up to 128GB. The ports are three Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, an SDXC slot, MagSafe and a headphone jack.

“PROLED XDR is the world’s best laptop display.”

That line comes from Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, and it is a company claim. The announcement offers no independent measurements.

On-device AI is the case for the Max chip

Apple positions M5 Max for people running language models locally, saying it can handle models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the device. Each GPU core has its own Neural Accelerator, and Apple demonstrates a coding agent running on a local model and LM Studio. The announcement does not give benchmark numbers or name which model sizes fit in which memory configuration.

The display also has professional uses beyond looks. Apple adds DICOM reference modes for nondiagnostic review of medical images, genlock support for virtual production, and an Apple Pro Display Calibrator for custom targets.

Prices from $2,899 and a cheaper M6 model a day earlier

Orders open today through Apple’s online store and the Apple Store app, in 30 markets that include the United States. Deliveries and store availability begin Friday, November 6. U.S. starting prices, with education pricing in parentheses:

• 14-inch with M5 Pro: $2,899 ($2,749)
• 16-inch with M5 Pro: $3,399 ($3,199)
• 14-inch with M5 Max: $4,499 ($4,199)
• 16-inch with M5 Max: $4,799 ($4,499)

Apple Upgrade leasing starts at $55.99 per month for 36 months, excluding taxes and trade-in credit.

Who should pay for the OLED model

A day earlier, Apple’s newsroom described a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. It starts at $1,999, or $1,899 with education savings, with 16GB of memory configurable to 32GB. That model keeps a Liquid Retina XDR display rated at up to 1600 nits and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, according to Apple. It also ships November 6.

The comparison shows what the new price buys. The cheapest PROLED XDR model costs $900 more than the M6 starting price. In return, buyers get a display Apple rates at 400 nits brighter with ten times the contrast ratio, plus touch, a Pro-class chip and up to 128GB of memory. For photographers, colorists and video editors who need a reference-grade screen on the road, that gap is easier to justify. For people who mainly want a faster laptop for everyday AI work, the M6 model covers much of the same ground for less. Apple has not said whether touch is limited to the new PROLED models.

The AI side matters for a wider audience too. Apple’s other launches this week lean heavily on local inference: our report on the M6 iMac notes Apple’s claim of up to 5x faster on-device AI than the M4 generation, measured in LM Studio, from $1,499. That figure comes from Apple and the test configurations were not given. The new MacBook Pro extends the same pitch to the top of the lineup, where unified memory of up to 128GB is the practical limit on local model size.

Regional reach is another open question. The MacBook Pro goes on sale in 30 markets, five fewer than the iMac’s 35. Siri AI is central to the Dynamic Island, yet our coverage of the five new Siri AI languages found that the EU is still locked out of it. Apple’s announcement does not say how the feature will behave on these laptops in markets where Siri AI is unavailable.

Touch support in third-party software is also a promise for now. Apple lists apps that will take advantage of it but does not give dates for each, and Creator Studio updates arrive in November. Independent reviews of display brightness, battery life and touch latency should follow once units ship on November 6.