All the news from Apple’s ‘Pro and tell’ event

Touchscreen laptops are nothing new in the Windows world, but Apple has only just announced its first MacBook with a touchscreen. Apple isn’t rushing to change a bunch of things in macOS to optimize for touch, though; most of the touch action will be in the apps themselves, it seems.

As far as major macOS changes go, iOS’s Dynamic Island will be debuting on the new MacBook Pro, and Apple touts the added touch controls as particularly useful for interacting with the interface to accept AirDrops and pause music playback.

Apple closed out its week of product announcements with a “Pro and Tell” event on Wednesday, where it took the wraps off its long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro. Though Apple may have saved its biggest and most exciting update for last, it revealed a few other device upgrades and updates in the days leading up to its big reveal. We’ve rounded them all up here.

Apple CEO John Ternus revealed the company’s first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, allowing you to perform gestures on your screen like scrolling, swiping, and pinching. The company says the touch sensor is “built directly into the display panel,” not on top of it, which helps to reduce latency.

Apple just announced its first touchscreen MacBook at its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday. It showed off the long-awaited touchscreen in a video of the new MacBook Pro during the event that you can watch right here to see the new display in action.

The new MacBook Pro’s PROLED XDR touch display is a tandem OLED panel with up to 2,000 nits of brightness and a 120Hz refresh rate. It features a hole punch for the webcam, rather than a notch. Apple says the new laptop weighs as little as 3 pounds. It also brings back the glowing Apple logo on its lid, which Apple CEO John Ternus teased in a video on X.

Steve Jobs famously called touchscreen laptops “ergonomically terrible,” and for over a decade, Apple stridently refused to make one. Today that all changes with the MacBook Pro — the company’s first laptop to embrace a touch interface. While it’s unlikely that Apple can fix all the “terrible” ergonomics of having to lift your arm up and touch a laptop screen, the company has put some effort into making macOS more touch-friendly.

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display weighs just 3 pounds, which is noticeably lighter than the current generation of non-touch MacBook Pros, which start at 3.4 pounds for the newly introduced M6 models. The difference is even bigger when you jump to the 16-inch model, which clocks in at 4 pounds, while the M5 Pro version without a touchscreen is 4.7. When picking up the 16-inch, you immediately notice the newfound lightness. It’s still got heft, but it feels better balanced when picking it up from a corner with one hand. Putting it side-by-side with a current 16-inch MacBook Pro, you see that it’s slightly thinner and has a footprint a smidge smaller. Aside from that, the feel of the materials is just like the MacBook Pros we’ve had for several years now.

Apple announced an all-new MacBook Pro laptop with an OLED touchscreen at its “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday. It starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model, or $3,399 for the 16-inch version, and it’s available to preorder today ahead of its release on November 6th.

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 peak SDR brightness, up to 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. There’s a Dynamic Island on the screen that can show you things like Live Activities, similar to what’s available on iPhones. And the glowing Apple logo on the lid has returned.

Apple has already had a busy week. On Monday, it announced a new iPad Mini with an upgraded OLED display, and on Tuesday, we got M6 chip upgrades for the MacBook Pro and iMac. The Macs are the definition of iterative updates — they’re quiet refreshes that look just like their direct predecessors. But today should be a whole lot more interesting.

At an event in Los Angeles, Apple is expected to debut a revamped MacBook Pro with a touchscreen display. This would be the first touchscreen on a Mac (not counting the beleaguered Touch Bar). Touchscreen laptops are something Apple executives have criticized for about as long as the iPad has existed. But after all this time, Apple is expected to give in to the growing demand to let people tap and swipe at a MacBook screen.

Apple is updating the iMac with M6 chips. The new iMac generation was introduced today, giving Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer a performance boost via the same chipset Apple launched with the Mac Mini in August. Prices start from $1,499, and the design otherwise appears largely unchanged. The update was announced ahead of Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event that’s scheduled to take place on Wednesday.

This refresh comes two years after Apple gave the iMac an overhaul with M4 chips, meaning we’re skipping the M5 series entirely on this hardware. That should make this upgrade more meaningful. The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip and includes a dual 16-core Neural Engine that can boost performance when running on-device AI tasks. According to Apple’s press release, the M6-powered iMac “delivers up to 5x faster on-device AI performance” compared with the M4 model.

Apple is giving its entry-level MacBook Pro a spec bump. After upgrading the entry-level MacBook Pro with its M5 chip a year ago, Apple is refreshing the laptop today with the M6 chip, which the company launched in August as part of recent upgrades to the new Mac Mini.

Last year’s entry-level MacBook Pro update brought minimal changes from the M4 model that debuted a year prior, including the same design, port layout, webcam, and speakers. The most notable updates, aside from the then-new M5 processor, was faster storage and the option to upgrade its capacity to a hefty 4TB for an extra $1,200.

It feels like Apple’s Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn’t all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its “Pro and tell” event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET. While obviously nothing is confirmed yet, it sure seems like we’re finally going to get that long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Beyond that? There could be an OLED update for the iPad Mini, plus M6 updates across other devices, following the M6 debut with the Mac Mini in August.

Apple has sent invites to a second product launch this month, and it’s scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles.

At the event, Apple is set to announce new Macs and a refreshed iPad Mini, according to Bloomberg. The big announcement is expected to be a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen that’s also lighter and has an iPhone-like Dynamic Island. But Apple is also planning on revealing a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac with the M6 chip, which was recently introduced with the Mac Mini. Apple’s updated iPad Mini will apparently finally get an OLED screen as well and put the selfie cam on the landscape edge.