Apple OLED MacBook Pro could get a touchscreen and Dynamic Island

Yes, the touchscreen MacBook Pro is real. Apple revealed it at its Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Oct. 28, as the last and biggest announcement in a busy week. It’s the first major redesign of the MacBook Pro in more than five years.

The touch sensor sits inside the display panel itself, which Apple says keeps lag low. Because macOS treats a tap as a click, every app responds to touch, even ones that were never built for it. Apple’s own apps have been tuned for fingers, and well-known third-party apps such as Canva, Notion, Zoom, Blender, DaVinci Resolve and Microsoft Office already support touch.

Apple’s demo video showed people dragging files, scrolling and using two-finger gestures like pinch-to-zoom while the laptop sat open in its normal position. It isn’t a 2-in-1 that folds into a tablet. To stop the screen wobbling every time you poke it, Apple redesigned the hinge so the display stays steady, which also helps keep your picture stable on video calls.

The screen is the headline upgrade. PROLED XDR is Apple’s name for tandem OLED, which stacks two layers of light-emitting pixels so the panel can get brighter and last longer. It’s the same kind of technology Apple already uses in the iPad Pro.

• Brightness: up to 2,000 nits at peak, for both HDR video and everyday SDR content.
• Contrast: Apple claims a 10,000,000:1 ratio, because OLED pixels switch fully off to show black.
• Refresh rate: ProMotion now scales from 10Hz up to 120Hz, so scrolling stays smooth while static screens save power.
• Color: full coverage of the P3 and Adobe RGB color ranges, aimed at photographers and video editors.

Thinner bezels let Apple grow the screens slightly, to 14.2 inches and 16.3 inches. A nano-texture option to cut glare is available, and this time it’s etched straight into the cover glass. Apple mentioned protection against burn-in, the ghost images OLED panels can develop over time, but didn’t say how it works.

The rumored replacement for the notch turned out to be true. A Dynamic Island now wraps around the webcam, the same idea iPhone owners know, where a black area around the camera expands to show live information.

On the Mac, it becomes a home for Spotlight search, Live Activities (like a delivery tracker or a sports score that updates in real time) and Siri AI. It’s a small touch, but it turns dead space at the top of the screen into something you can use.

This is where many buyers will pause. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 in the US and the 16-inch at $3,399. Canadian pricing starts at $3,999 CAD for the 14-inch with an M5 Pro chip and $4,799 CAD for the 16-inch, before tax. UK pricing wasn’t in the launch coverage we reviewed, so check Apple’s UK store.

Top-end builds get far more expensive. A fully loaded 16-inch model with the M5 Max chip, 128GB of memory and 16TB of storage runs well into five figures, which puts it in workstation territory rather than family-laptop territory. Rising memory prices across the industry are part of the reason.

Here’s a twist: the new laptop runs the M5 Pro and M5 Max, not the newer M6. Apple launched a separate 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 the same week, starting at $1,999, with a regular Liquid Retina XDR screen and no touch. So the most advanced display comes with last generation’s chip.

If you mainly browse, write and stream, the touchscreen model is a lot of money for a nicer screen and a new way to scroll. The M6 MacBook Pro, or even an older model, will handle that work for far less.

If you edit photos or video, the case is stronger. The brighter, higher-contrast screen and wide color coverage are built for that work, and creative apps are adding touch features of their own. Subscribers to Apple’s Creator Studio app bundle will get free updates in November that use the new display and touch.

The weight cut is real too. The 14-inch model weighs 3 pounds, down from 3.4 pounds, and the 16-inch weighs 4 pounds, down 0.7 pounds. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours. You still get a useful set of ports: three Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, MagSafe, HDMI, an SDXC card slot and a headphone jack. The rear Apple logo lights up again, a nod to older MacBooks, and colors are space black and silver.