A day after refreshing its MacBook Pro, Apple refreshes its MacBook Pro again. This time, the touchscreen takes centre stage.
“Ergonomically terrible” was how Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs described the concept of a touchscreen on a laptop in 2010. He may well be turning in his grave, but he can no longer stop the launch of the MacBook Pro with Proled XDR-display. Apple will put the device, equipped with a touchscreen, on the market from 6 November.
Refresh, take two
The launch follows an earlier refresh of the MacBook Pro, also this week. The laptop maker from Cupertino is making a bit of a mess of things by selling the computer as a separate device. There is now the 14-inch MacBook Pro, available with M6 but without major changes to the chassis. Apple also still sells a 16-inch version of it, but only an M5 Max is available for that model.
Those laptops now sit alongside the MacBook Pro with Proled XDR-display, available in 14-inch and 16-inch, fitted as standard with the touchscreen that gives the device its name. You won’t find an M6 processor in this version: Apple is launching the touch versions with M5 Pro or M5 Max.
Touchscreen
The display naturally takes centre stage, with touch functionality as the distinguishing factor. Apple is not changing the design of its laptop (apart from a few details around the webcam). So there is no 360° hinge to complement the touch functionality. Brightness reaches up to 1,000 nits (2,000 peak for HDR) and the laptop supports both P3 and Adobe RGB. For the previously refreshed MacBook Pro without a touchscreen, Adobe RGB support is not mentioned.
Apple is also making the laptop lighter. The 14-inch model with M5 Pro weighs 1.38 kg, compared with 1.6 kg for the 14-inch MacBook with a conventional display and the same processor. Even so, Apple says battery life is similar, with a claim of “up to 24 hours”. It is also notable that the Apple logo on the back will light up again.
Plenty of announcements
Apple could have made things easy for itself by not splitting up the MacBook Pro refresh. A new MacBook Pro, with M6, M5 Pro or M5 Max, OLED display optional, availability varying by configuration, would cover it completely. Cupertino seems to be angling for extra attention, however, with a week full of announcements that would all fit into a single launch. Earlier this week, for instance, a new iPad mini with OLED also passed in review, and Apple is putting new iMacs on the market.
The MacBook Pro with touchscreen is available from 3,349 euros incl. VAT. For that money you immediately get 24 GB of RAM (shared with the integrated GPU), which is not bad in these times of exorbitant prices. A 1 TB SSD is also included. As is traditional, custom configurations quickly push the price up: for the 14-inch laptop with 48 GB of memory, 2 TB of storage and an M5 Max with eighteen compute cores, you pay 6,075 euros.