// ZDNET — MOBILE & WEB
Apple’s new touchscreen MacBook Pros may be late, but they have one big advantage
Apple finally revealed its new MacBook M5 Pro and Max with a touchscreen OLED display, bringing the best features from the iPhone to its laptops.
Steve Jobs might be rolling over in his grave, but at long last, Apple announced a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen display. The new MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max features a tandem OLED display Apple is calling “ProLED XDR”, scaling up to 2,000 nits of brightness and a 120Hz refresh rate. For the first time, the MacBook Pro will feature touchscreen capabilities and the Dynamic Island — a feature first introduced on the iPhone.
Also: Forget the touchscreen MacBook – Apple’s new M6 is the laptop I recommend for most people
The display and controversial form factor aren’t its only draws: it features a thinner, lighter design and brings back the illuminated Apple logo on the back — some of the most significant changes to the MacBook chassis in years. The new MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips will come in both 14- and 16-inch sizes, with up to 128GB of unified memory, and weigh less than ever: the smaller model at three pounds and the 16-inch at four pounds.
The company, under new CEO John Ternus, is on a spree with new products, with its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, earlier this month (another product that’s been in development for years), and an all-new lineup of smart home products aimed at challenging Amazon’s dominance in that market.
The MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max feature new ProLED XDR displays that control color and pixel luminance at the sub-millisecond level, while monitoring and adapting usage over time, Apple says. The panels feature a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and cover both the P3 and Adobe RGB color gamuts, high-end specs indeed for a laptop display.
To reduce glare, Apple says it etched the nano-texture directly into the glass, since the touch sensor is built directly into the panel rather than layered on top of it.
The displays work with Apple’s ProMotion technology, which adjusts refresh rates based on what the device is actively doing: scaling down to 10Hz while idle for better power efficiency and ramping up to 120Hz during gaming or graphics-heavy tasks.
In terms of software and usability, Apple says apps should be ready to go on the new MacBook Pros, since they’re set to register touches as clicks.
Touchscreen laptops are nothing new, having been standard fare on laptops of all kinds for years now. Apple’s entrance into the market is notable because the company took such a hard-line stance against them for years (Jobs famously called them “ergonomically terrible“), but honestly, the everyday consumer in 2026 may struggle to see the big deal.