Credit : Apple
LOS ANGELES, October 29, 2026 – Apple has unveiled its first-ever touchscreen laptop, the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, ending years of resistance to bringing touch to the Mac. The 14- and 16-inch models, powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, were announced at the company’s “Pro and tell” event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 28 (US time), and go on sale from November 6.
“Yes, for the very first time, we are bringing touch to the Mac,” Apple chief executive John Ternus told media and analysts in Los Angeles, according to CNBC. In a post on X, Ternus wrote: “We’re glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro. You’ve gotta touch it to believe it,” while Apple executive chairman Tim Cook posted: “We brought Touch to the Mac!”
According to Apple’s press release, the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel rather than layered on top of it, which the company says reduces latency. Users can swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom in on a photo, drag and drop slides between presentations, and double-tap a window to fill the screen. Apple said touch works alongside the familiar keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures, and a newly designed hinge provides greater stability when the screen is touched. Many existing apps work with touch straight away, as macOS translates touches into clicks.
The new PROLED XDR panel uses tandem OLED technology, offering up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR and SDR brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a 120Hz variable refresh rate and support for both the P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces. Slimmer borders push the screen sizes to 14.2 and 16.3 inches. The Dynamic Island, first seen on iPhone, also arrives on the Mac as the home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI, and the illuminated Apple logo returns to the lid, The Verge reported.
Apple said the 14-inch model now weighs 3 pounds (about 1.36kg) and the 16-inch model 4 pounds (about 1.81kg), with both slightly thinner than before. The laptops offer up to 128GB of unified memory, up to 16TB of storage, up to 24 hours of battery life and three Thunderbolt 5 ports, and run macOS 27. “The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is a monumental step forward for the Mac,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer.
In the United States, the 14-inch model with M5 Pro starts at US$2,899 and the 16-inch at US$3,399, while M5 Max versions start at US$4,499 and US$4,799 respectively. Pre-orders opened in 30 countries and regions on October 28. On its Malaysian online store, Apple says pre-orders open at 9am MYT on October 30, with availability from November 6. Malaysian technology site SoyaCincau reported local prices starting from RM11,999 for the 14-inch M5 Pro model, RM14,499 for the 16-inch M5 Pro, RM19,299 for the 14-inch M5 Max and RM20,499 for the 16-inch M5 Max.
The launch marks a major reversal for Apple. The Verge noted that Steve Jobs called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, and that Cook, on a 2012 earnings call, said: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” CNBC reported that software chief Craig Federighi said in 2018 that the ergonomics would fatigue users, while Ternus, then head of hardware engineering, told The Wall Street Journal in 2021: “We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad… And the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input.”
Until now, Apple had reserved touch for the iPad. Its closest Mac experiment was the Touch Bar, introduced on MacBook Pro models in 2016 and fully dropped in 2023, according to The Verge. The new model sits alongside the existing MacBook Pro line-up, including the M6-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro announced earlier this week, as well as new iMac and iPad mini models.
The announcement comes amid a difficult laptop market. CNBC, citing market researcher IDC, reported that total PC shipments fell 20 per cent year on year in the third quarter, and that only 17 per cent of notebook PCs shipped globally this year will have touchscreens.
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