Hands-on with Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro

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 still has 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.

Also exciting is the return of the glowing Apple logo. It’s a seemingly minor feature, but one that definitely got the audience excited during the introduction, and marks the return of a bit of flair to the MacBook lineup which, let’s be fair, has grown a bit utilitarian-looking over the years. Like the illuminated lid logo from years back, its brightness matches your screen, so it dims and can be fully turned off.

Touch works almost exactly like you’d expect it to with Apple’s first-party apps. You can swipe directly on the screen to scroll through websites, pinch to zoom, and double-tap to maximize a window. Some third-party apps might need to be updated to take advantage, but they shouldn’t be completely useless since macOS simply translates taps to clicks as a fallback. That said, anyone who has tried to “click” a tiny button in an app with their finger knows it’s a pretty fiddly experience at best, and infuriating at worst.

Apple is trying to address this, at least slightly, by magnifying some controls when you poke at them — like the red, yellow, and green traffic light buttons in the top-left corner of windows to close, minimize, and maximize an app. Similarly, tapping to open a drop-down menu magnifies it, giving you a bigger target. And while MacBook Pro hinges are pretty solid, yes, you can make it wobble pretty easily with some firm taps towards the top of the screen.

The Dynamic Island is a nice improvement over the notch, though. It’s so small and tucks nicely out of the way. Things like your music currently playing will live up there, and you can tap it for quick controls. When you change the brightness or volume, that’s also where you’ll see the slider pop out from, rather than the upper right-hand corner.

The screen itself is gorgeous. No surprises there. The OLED is punchy, bright, contrasty, and saturated. All the adjectives you want to hear about a display. But it’s not like the Liquid Retina display was some sort of slouch. Without more time to do side-by-side comparisons, it’s hard to tell just how much of an improvement the OLED XDR display is.

On first impression, at least, the touchscreen doesn’t seem likely to revolutionize the MacBook. And not having Pencil support just seems like a huge missed opportunity. That’s why it’s just a MacBook Pro variant, and not an entirely new product line. Unsurprisingly, there is a price premium for the new MacBook Pro PROLED XDR. The touchscreen OLED model starts at $2,899, $400 more than the otherwise similarly-specced M5 Pro MacBook Pro.