There are Apple announcements that make your react with the ambivalence reserved for incremental updates, some others that make you nod approvingly, and then there are those that make you stop mid-sentence and look again. Launched at Apple’s Pro and Tell event today in Los Angeles, the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display falls firmly in the last category. After years of insisting that a touchscreen on a Mac made little sense, Apple has finally relented – and not simply slapped a touch layer onto an existing laptop and called it a day. The new flagship Mac portable is a rather comprehensive rethink of what its most serious laptop can be, without messing with the things that make a Mac a Mac. At today’s event, I went hands on with new MacBook Pro, and came away with some thoughts.
Reach out and Touch
The headline act is, naturally, the new PROLED XDR display (it’s quite the mouthful). Apple has moved to a tandem OLED panel, bringing the sort of deep blacks, punchy colours and contrast that made the OLED iPad Pro such a visual treat, to a much larger canvas. The 120Hz refresh rate keeps scrolling fluid, while peak brightness reaches a reported 2,000 nits. For anyone who spends their days looking at photographs, video timelines or simply a lot of text, this is an upgrade that should matter even if they never touch the screen.
And, yes, you can finally touch it. Swipe through photographs, pinch to zoom, drag clips along a video timeline or fiddle with editing controls directly on the display. To be clear, Apple hasn’t attempted to turn macOS into iPadOS overnight, and that is probably a good thing. The keyboard and trackpad remain right where you expect them, while touch is an additional way of interacting with the machine. My limited use today suggests the gestures feel intuitive, although how consistently third-party apps embrace the new interface will be worth watching. I suspect the real appeal will be less about tapping everything in sight and more about those little moments when reaching for the screen feels more natural than reaching for the trackpad. Selecting a point on a video timeline, adjusting a slider or zooming into a photograph are obvious examples. For creative professionals, that could be genuinely useful. For the rest of us, it might take a while to become muscle memory, particularly for those who have been on a Mac for years and have, steadfastly, had to avoid touching the screen.
A lighter Touch
Even if you don’t often use the touchscreen, the change any buyer will appreciate is the serious weight loss regime Apple has put the new MacBook Pros through. The new 14-inch model comes in at around 1.38kg (16-inch at 1.82kg), a 220g/320g saving that might sound trivial on paper, but anyone who routinely carries a MacBook Pro, charger and assorted accessories through airports knows that every little bit helps. Fortunately, the weight loss hasn’t come at the expense of the essentials – the keyboard and trackpad remain, as do the useful ports that make the Pro a practical working machine rather than an exercise in dongle management. Under the hood, M5 Pro and M5 Max silicon provide the muscle, but the more crucial point is that you’re getting a more portable machine with a significantly upgraded display and an entirely new way to interact with it.
The largely similar design is not without a few cosmetic flourishes either. The notch has given way to a smaller Dynamic Island, bringing a little iPhone DNA to the Mac, while the glowing Apple logo on the lid makes a long-awaited comeback. And no, the latter is hardly a productivity feature, but anyone who remembers the illuminated logos on older PowerBooks and MacBooks will appreciate the nostalgia.
A Touchscreen Mac – So Why Now?
Apple has spent years drawing a fairly firm line between the Mac and the iPad, with the former aimed at getting work done with a keyboard and pointer, while the latter was all about touch-first computing. That distinction has increasingly been blurred as iPads have become more capable and Macs have grown more powerful. A touchscreen MacBook Pro doesn't erase the differences between the two, but it does acknowledge that people don't always want to interact with their computers in just one way.
Of course, there will be questions - will the display hold up to fingerprints? Will touch support feel equally polished across the apps professionals rely on? And will the slimmer chassis manage sustained workloads without compromising performance or thermals? A hands-on session can tell you only so much. Then there is the price. Starting at ₹3,49,900 for the 14-inch model and ₹4,09,900 for the 16-inch M5 Pro chipset configuration, this is firmly premium territory, even though the sticker price doesn’t seem unwarranted given the recent price hikes driven by the memory crisis - the display and design changes look substantial, but the eventual verdict will depend on whether the everyday experience justifies that premium.
Any way you look at it, this feels like more than a routine annual refresh. Apple has taken a product whose formula has been remarkably stable and reconsidered how it looks, feels and responds to its user. The touchscreen may not replace the trackpad – to be fair, it doesn't need to. If Apple gets the details right, the best thing about this MacBook Pro might be that it doesn't force you to choose between the old way of working and a new one. After years of waiting, that feels like a pretty big deal.
Bonus: The iPad mini gets its moment
The iPad mini has always been Apple's delightful little outlier: too small to replace a laptop, yet considerably more useful than a phone when you want to read, sketch or get some quick work done. The eighth-generation model finally gives it an OLED makeover, with an 8.5-inch display, slimmer bezels and peak brightness of up to 1,200 nits. The A20 Pro chip brings a performance boost, while a redesigned acoustic display promises beefier sound. Plus, there’s Apple Pencil support. There's a catch: the screen on this device (₹82,900 onwards) still runs at 60Hz, rather than the smoother 120Hz found on Apple's Pro tablets. But the mini was never about winning a spec-sheet arms race. It's about portability, and this one looks like an especially tempting companion device. Also updated alongside was the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, featuring up to 30% faster graphics, 25% faster AI performance, Wi-Fi 7, and up to 24 hours of battery life. Running macOS 27, it introduces advanced Siri AI capabilities, and starts at ₹239,900.