The touchscreen MacBook Pro is a winner

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is a lighter, thinner, and all-around better laptop. Oh, and sure, there’s a touchscreen.

by David Pierce

Photography by Owen Grove / The Verge

Nov 5, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

I keep forgetting the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has a touchscreen. I’ve been testing this new laptop, one of the most impressive Apple has ever created, for the better part of a week. I can’t stop noticing some of its other features: the slimmer design, the improved display, the Dynamic Island that somehow catches my eye more than the notch ever did. But I keep forgetting that as I go about my day, I can now reach out and poke the screen.

Come to think of it, that might be exactly what Apple intended. Steve Jobs said touch laptops were a bad idea; some subset of users demanded one anyway. Now the MacBook Pro has one. But not in a way that meaningfully changes the laptop experience. There have been a few times I have found the touchscreen genuinely useful, better or more intuitive than anything I could do with a trackpad or a mouse. But to call this “the touchscreen MacBook Pro” just doesn’t feel right. It’s the latest evolution of Apple’s most powerful laptop — and oh, it happens to have a touchscreen.

Very little about this laptop, or my experience with it, will come as a surprise. That’s a good thing; the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display (which I will just be calling the PROLED Pro from now on, because ugh, the name) comes with a bunch of new upgrades but no new problems, and performs as well as you’d expect from a laptop this expensive. Combine the screen, the body, and the touch, and you have something like a new generation of MacBook Pro. It’s going to be a good one.

9

Verge Score

The Good

• Gorgeous OLED screen
• Lighter and thinner
• Excellent performance

The Bad

• Big bump in Pro price
• I don’t love the speakers

The 14-inch PROLED Pro starts at $2,899, and the 16-inch at $3,399. Both come with either an M5 Pro or M5 Max chip, each with two configurations to choose from, plus a bunch of RAM and storage options. It’s a lot of options! (My review unit is a 14-inch model with an M5 Pro chip that has 18 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, plus 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Total cost: $3,699.) In general, this device runs about a $400 premium over the standard, similarly specced Pro, but spoiler alert: I think it’s worth it, touchscreen or no touchscreen.

If you buy the fully loaded PROLED Pro with the beefiest M5 Max chip, nano-texture glass, 128GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage — at a whopping $14,549 — you are my hero. And I have some questions.

My middle-of-the-road PROLED configuration benchmarks almost exactly in line with other devices running an M5 Pro, such as the most recent Mac Mini. One simple way to think about Apple’s M-series chips is that the cores get faster with every generation, and you get a bunch of additional cores (and faster memory) with the Pro and Max chips. So on a single-core, one-task benchmark, the M5 Pro comes in slightly behind most M6 devices, even much cheaper ones. But as you get to more complex computing tasks, particularly anything involving the GPU, the M5 Pro and Max brute-force their way to better performance.

That means the M5 Pro and Max suit anyone doing heavily graphical work or local AI development. The tests prove these laptops are very fast, which we already knew. They also prove they’re just as fast despite being inside a machine that’s smaller and thinner, which is not always a given. Apple says it redesigned the thermals inside the laptop both to accommodate the new design and to direct heat away from the OLED display, which can degrade or even fail if it gets too hot for too long. The Pro’s fans always seem to turn on before the laptop even gets a little hot — that’s clearly deliberate on Apple’s part.

As for the OLED itself, it’s gorgeous. The slimmer bezels and smaller cutout make it loom even larger and more central in the laptop; it has almost that iPad-like, “magic pane of glass” feel. It’s sharp and contrast-y, gets both very bright (though it only hits peak brightness under very specific conditions) and very dim, and is better even than the very good screens on Apple’s other laptops. Visual professionals will need, and appreciate, the fidelity to P3 and Adobe’s RGB color spaces; the rest of us will probably most notice just how much more dramatic the blacks look as we play games or watch movies. I generally live in dark mode, and it looks even better on this machine.

One theme of Apple’s recent product launches has been how much thinner an OLED display is than an LCD, and what that means for the product as a whole. What it means, mostly, is that the Apple logo can glow again. But also, just as OLED made it possible for the iPad Mini to shrink even more, the PROLED Pro is smaller than its predecessors by an impressive margin. My 14-inch model is a fraction of an inch smaller in every dimension than the standard MacBook Pro, which is always a good thing, but the half-pound weight decrease (more than two-thirds of a pound on the 16-inch model!) is what really impresses me. At 3 pounds on the dot, the 14-inch PROLED Pro is closer in weight to the 15-inch MacBook Air than the 14-inch MacBook Pro. It still feels solid and dense, but I appreciate the slimmer build every time I pick it up or toss it in my backpack.

The only small downside of this new design, at least to my ears, is the speakers. The Pro’s built-in speakers have always been impressive, but I find the new model a bit bass-heavy and roomy. Everything sounds like it’s playing in a large, empty warehouse. Still, these are better speakers than you’ll find in almost any other laptop.

Most of the rest of the hardware hasn’t changed. Same three Thunderbolt 5 ports, same HDMI and SD card access, same headphone jack, same keyboard, same trackpad. Even the battery life seems about the same: I get through a pretty heavy workday with a third or more of the battery left. I would always like more ports, especially on a device with this much raw multitasking power, but this appears to be the selection Apple is going with.

Give it a year or two, and I suspect every model in the MacBook Pro lineup will look like this. The OLED display, and the smaller and lighter laptop it enables, are such obvious upgrades that Apple would be silly not to bring them to other devices. Do you need to pay the $400 premium just to get them right now? Probably not. But next time you’re in the market for a MacBook, get one with the new screen and the new look.

So far, we’ve talked about a bunch

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