TechGadgetsAppleThe touchscreen MacBook Pro is a winnerThe MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is a lighter, thinner, and all-around better laptop. Oh, and sure, there\u2019s a touchscreen.If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.by David PiercePhotography by Owen Grove \/ The VergeNov 5, 2026, 2:00 PM UTCShareGiftIf you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.You can look, and you can touch. (Note: all the photos in this review are of the 16-inch PROLED Pro.) | Photo: Owen Grove \/ The VergeDavid Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech.<\/p>\n
Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.I keep forgetting the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has a touchscreen. I\u2019ve been testing this new laptop, one of the most impressive Apple has ever created, for the better part of a week. I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But to call this \u201cthe touchscreen MacBook Pro\u201d just doesn\u2019t feel right. It\u2019s the latest evolution of Apple\u2019s most powerful laptop \u2014 and oh, it happens to have a touchscreen.Very little about this laptop, or my experience with it, will come as a surprise. That\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s going to be a good one.9Verge ScoreApple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display$2899$2899The GoodGorgeous OLED screenLighter and thinnerExcellent performanceThe BadBig bump in Pro priceI don\u2019t love the speakers$2899 at Apple$2899 at Best Buy (w\/ $100 gift card)$2899 at B&HHow we rate and review productsThe 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 at a whopping $14,549 \u2014 you are my hero.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The tests prove these laptops are very fast, which we already knew. They also prove they\u2019re just as fast despite being inside a machine that\u2019s 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\u2019s fans always seem to turn on before the laptop even gets a little hot \u2014 that\u2019s clearly deliberate on Apple\u2019s part.The smaller bezels and Dynamic Island make the screen look even more impressive.As for the OLED itself, it\u2019s gorgeous.<\/p>\n
The slimmer bezels and smaller cutout make it loom even larger and more central in the laptop; it has almost that iPad-like, \u201cmagic pane of glass\u201d feel. It\u2019s 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\u2019s other laptops. Visual professionals will need, and appreciate, the fidelity to P3 and Adobe\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s built-in speakers have always been impressive, but I find the new model a bit bass-heavy and roomy. Everything sounds like it\u2019s playing in a large, empty warehouse. Still, these are better speakers than you\u2019ll find in almost any other laptop.Give it a year or two, and I suspect every model in the MacBook Pro lineup will look like thisMost of the rest of the hardware hasn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Do you need to pay the $400 premium just to get them right now? Probably not. But next time you\u2019re in the market for a MacBook, get one with the new screen and the new look.Oooh, glowing.So far, we\u2019ve talked about a bunch of things that add up to a better MacBook Pro. If there\u2019s a big new idea about computing in here, it\u2019s the PROLED Pro\u2019s touch support.<\/p>\n
For the first time ever, the Mac has a touchscreen. The mental model for that touchscreen is very simple: It\u2019s a mouse emulator. When you tap on the screen, the Pro registers it like you\u2019ve clicked the mouse or trackpad. In theory, this should work everywhere; in practice, it works almost everywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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