Apple Finally Builds a Touchscreen MacBook Pro, and Charges You $400 to Believe It

At its "Pro and tell" event on October 28, Apple introduced the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, the company's first touchscreen Mac after more than a decade of insisting a notebook screen had no business responding to a finger. The 14.2-inch and 16.3-inch models keep the familiar M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, trade the notch for a Dynamic Island, and add a tandem OLED panel rated for 2,000 nits of peak brightness, which is a lot of brightness to spend proving a point.

CEO John Ternus made the pitch personal, posting on X that the team is "glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro. You've gotta touch it to believe it," a tagline that doubles as a confession. For a company that spent years treating fingerprints on a vertical screen as a design failure rather than a feature, "believe it" is doing a lot of work.

The reversal comes with a price tag attached: touchscreen configurations start $400 above their non-touch equivalents, which keeps the feature a Pro-tier upsell rather than a standard upgrade. Apple paired the announcement with a redesigned 14-inch MacBook Pro running a new M6 chip at $1,999 and an M6 iMac starting at $1,499, both open for preorder the same day, a reminder that touch is the splurge, not the default.

The glowing Apple logo on the lid and a redesigned speaker system that Apple says delivers 50% deeper bass are the kind of details that read as flourish, but they're doing real positioning work. A laptop that lights up and thumps now looks less like a tool and more like a stage prop, which is exactly how Apple wants a machine north of three grand to feel.

The louder story is what Apple just admitted. A talking point that held for more than a decade didn't survive contact with the iPad's success and a decade of touchscreen Windows laptops selling just fine without it. The product is new. The climbdown is the headline.

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Source: 9to5Mac

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →