Apple's OLED MacBook Pro Is the Screen Upgrade That Makes the Touchscreen Irrelevant

The first touchscreen Mac buries its own headline feature. The real story is a 14% weight cut, a tandem OLED panel that embarrasses every LCD laptop, and a £400 premium that's hard to argue against if you're already spending £2,499.

Apple has spent over a decade telling you that you don't need to touch your laptop screen. Now it's shipped a touchscreen Mac and — in a move that is either supremely confident or slightly embarrassing — proven its own earlier point. The touch layer on the new PROLED XDR MacBook Pro is fine. It's also the least interesting thing about this machine. The display itself is the event. Tandem OLED at 3024×1986 (14in) or 3472×2266 (16in), peaking at 2,000 nits, with per-pixel lighting that eliminates the blooming artifacts that plagued even Apple's excellent mini-LED panels. This is the kind of screen that makes you notice other screens are worse. Dark mode stops being an aesthetic choice and becomes the default because blacks are actually black. For photo editors, colorists, and anyone whose work involves looking at a screen for ten hours, this is a genuine tool upgrade, not a spec-sheet number. The weight reduction matters more than it reads on paper. The 14in model at 1.38kg is now only 150g heavier than the 13in MacBook Air — a machine with dramatically less horsepower. The 16in drops 15% to 1.82kg. If you've carried a previous 16in Pro through an airport, you know this isn't marginal. Apple achieved this while keeping the same port selection (three Thunderbolt 5, HDMI 2.1, SDXC, headphone jack) and the same M5 Pro/Max chip options as the LCD models. The touchscreen implementation is competent but clearly additive, not foundational. Single taps mirror mouse clicks. Pinch-to-zoom and rotate work directly on the display. Three-finger swipes trigger Mission Control. The dynamic island around the webcam replaces the notch and is a visual improvement, though Apple's decision to put Touch ID here instead of Face ID remains baffling when every iPhone with a dynamic island has face recognition. Third-party developers have new touch APIs for tools like radial menus and scrubbing dials, but adoption is thin at launch. Battery life holds steady against the LCD models despite the OLED panel: roughly two days of office work on the 14in, and the 16in M5 Max still ends a heavy creative workday at 40% charge. Apple claims the battery survives over 1,000 full charge cycles, and replacement costs £225 — reasonable by Apple standards, though the machine's RAM and SSD remain soldered and non-upgradeable. Pricing is where this gets uncomfortable. The OLED 14in starts at £2,899/$2,899 — a £400 premium over the matching-spec LCD model. But the LCD 14in M5 Pro already starts at £2,499, so you're paying roughly 16% more for a dramatically better screen and a meaningfully lighter chassis. In a world where Apple's RAM pricing has been inflated by what the review calls 'RAMageddon,' every configuration gets expensive fast. The 16in OLED starts at £3,399. The light-up Apple logo returns on the lid, which is pure nostalgia play and works as one. The 55% recycled materials claim is documented in Apple's environmental impact report. WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support round out the connectivity. This is a five-year laptop from a company that redesigns on five-year cycles, and the OLED panel is the kind of upgrade that will still look current at the end of that window.