How good is the new touchscreen MacBook Pro? Early reviews and UAE prices

Dubai: For years, Apple kept touchscreens off its Macs. That changed on Wednesday, when the company unveiled the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, its first Mac laptop you can tap, swipe and pinch.

Pre-orders are already open in the UAE, and the laptop reaches customers and stores on Friday, November 6. The 14-inch model starts at Dh11,999.

So, is the touchscreen any good? Here is what early hands-on reviews say, and what it will cost you in the UAE.

Touch is built into a new tandem OLED panel, which Apple calls PROLED XDR. According to Apple, the touch sensor sits directly inside the display rather than on top of it, which reduces latency.

You can scroll, pinch, rotate and draw. Double-tapping a window makes it fill the screen, and windows can be flicked into place. macOS also translates taps into clicks, so most existing apps work with touch straight away.

The notch is gone too. In its place is a Dynamic Island, the pill-shaped cutout from recent iPhones, which shows music controls, calls and Live Activities.

The laptops are lighter, too. The 14-inch model weighs about 1.4kg, around 230g less than before, while the 16-inch is about 1.8kg, roughly 320g lighter.

The first hands-on reports describe touch as responsive, but treat it as an extra rather than the main way to use the laptop.

Mark Spoonauer, Global Editor-in-Chief of Tom’s Guide, tried it after the launch. “I found the touchscreen support to be pretty smooth as I navigated between apps,” he wrote.

Pinch-to-zoom worked as expected in his test, and dragging video clips along an editing timeline was easy. Drawing also worked, with one catch. “I could draw using my finger with ease, though there’s no Apple Pencil support to speak of.”

Over at Engadget, Nathan Ingraham found that swiping through photos, zooming and adjusting sliders in the Photos app all worked as expected. He noted, however, that macOS itself has barely changed for touch. Apart from the window buttons growing slightly when touched, there are few visible concessions to fingers.

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, made a similar point on X. He noted that almost every demo he had seen involved some mis-touches and slight fumbles, because this is still a computer designed for a keyboard and trackpad or mouse. He added, though, that there is no denying the touchscreen is responsive and smooth.

The keyboard and trackpad remain the main way to use the Mac, with touch designed to work alongside them.

The bigger change, beyond touch, is the panel itself. Previous MacBook Pros used mini-LED screens, which light the display from behind with thousands of tiny LEDs. OLED pixels produce their own light and can switch off completely, so black areas are truly black.

Apple uses a tandem OLED panel, with two stacked layers of OLED, the same technology it introduced on the iPad Pro. According to Apple, the design lets the screen get brighter while lasting longer.

Ingraham was impressed, calling it the best display he has used on an Apple device and praising its deep blacks.

It reaches up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, has an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz and, according to Apple, a contrast ratio of 10,000,000:1. It covers both the P3 and Adobe RGB colour ranges, aimed at photographers and designers, and it comes in two finishes.

Buyers can choose between the standard glossy glass and a nano-texture version, which is etched at a microscopic level to scatter light and cut glare.

On a touchscreen, the choice also changes how the screen feels. According to MKBHD, the nano-texture version feels smoother and softer to the touch, while the glossy glass drags a little under your finger.

He also found that both versions did a surprisingly good job of hiding fingerprints.

The launch reverses a position Apple held for more than a decade. In 2010, Steve Jobs argued that touch surfaces should not be vertical, and that holding your arm up to a vertical screen quickly becomes tiring.

“It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible,” he said at the time.

Whether buyers will reach for the screen often remains to be seen. Apple’s own pitch focuses on specific uses, such as testing iPhone apps directly onscreen in Xcode, rotating 3D objects in Blender and playing faders and instruments in Logic Pro.

Gulf News reported the following starting prices in the UAE:

14-inch with M5 Pro: Dh11,999
16-inch with M5 Pro: Dh14,499
14-inch with M5 Max: Dh19,299
16-inch with M5 Max: Dh20,999

In the US, the 14-inch starts at $2,899 (about Dh10,646) and the 16-inch at $3,399 (about Dh12,483). US prices are listed before sales tax, while UAE prices include 5 per cent VAT.

The previous M5 Pro MacBook Pro models, without touch, launched in March at Dh9,299 and Dh11,499, so the new 14-inch costs Dh2,700 more and the 16-inch Dh3,000 more.

If you do not need touch, Apple also launched a separate, standard 14-inch MacBook Pro with the base M6 chip this week, starting at Dh8,499. It does not have a touchscreen or the new OLED panel, and deliveries also begin on November 6.

Pre-orders for the touchscreen model opened on October 28, and education pricing is available on all four models.