Apple’s new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, the first Mac to carry a touchscreen, is a lighter and thinner revision of the company’s flagship laptop that performs like the M5 Pro and M5 Max machines it is built on. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, roughly a $400 premium over a similarly specced standard MacBook Pro. Buyers choose between the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, each offered in two configurations, along with a range of RAM and storage options. A fully loaded 16-inch model with the top M5 Max chip, nano-texture glass, 128GB of RAM and 16TB of storage reaches $14,549.
In week-long testing, the touchscreen registered taps as mouse clicks and worked almost everywhere, though some game buttons did not respond to touch and actions that depend on hovering a cursor cannot be done with a tap. Apple made small changes to macOS to accommodate touch, such as automatically expanding the traffic lights used to manage windows, and developers can add their own support. The reviewer noted repeatedly forgetting the touchscreen was present, since it does not meaningfully change how the laptop is used, and described the display and lighter body as the more consequential changes.
The PROLED screen is brighter, dimmer and higher in contrast than the panels on Apple’s other laptops, with fidelity to the P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces. Because OLED is thinner than LCD, the 14-inch model is slightly smaller in every dimension than the standard MacBook Pro, and the 14-inch unit weighs 3 pounds, a half-pound reduction; the 16-inch model drops more than two-thirds of a pound. Apple redesigned the laptop’s thermals to fit the smaller body and to direct heat away from the OLED display, and the fans come on before the machine gets hot.
Benchmarks put the mid-range M5 Pro test unit in line with other M5 Pro devices, including the most recent Mac Mini. The M5 Pro trails most M6 devices on single-core tests but pulls ahead on complex tasks that use the GPU, which the reviewer said suits graphical work and local AI development. The rest of the hardware is unchanged: three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, the same keyboard and trackpad, and similar battery life. The reviewer found the new speakers bass-heavy.
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