Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro laptop with an OLED touchscreen at its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday.
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. The 14-inch model weighs 3 pounds, CEO John Ternus said onstage at the event. And the glowing Apple logo on the lid has returned.
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.
