Apple unveiled the MacBook Pro with a ProLED XDR display, and the first thing Marques Brownlee did was pull up a Steve Jobs clip from years ago. In it, Jobs explains exactly why touchscreens on vertical surfaces are a bad idea, why arms fatigue, why it makes a great demo but ultimately does not work. Then Brownlee cut back to himself with a single line: ‘Sorry, I had to.’ Apple said they would never do it. Now they did.
A display worth talking about before the touchscreen even starts
The new MacBook Pro comes in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes and starts at $2,900. The headline feature is the touchscreen, but Brownlee keeps circling back to something else: the weight. The 14-inch model drops from three and a half pounds to three pounds. The 16-inch loses nearly a full pound. That shift comes from the new tandem OLED display and a redesigned cooling system inside the chassis. The OLED also brings a 10-million-to-one contrast ratio, pitch blacks with almost no blooming, and thinner bezels that make the display slightly larger than before. Apple is calling it the ProLED XDR display, because of course they named it. It comes in a standard glossy finish or a matte nanotexture option.
There is a Dynamic Island at the top now instead of the old notch, housing the webcam and ambient light sensor, but no Face ID. The glowing Apple logo on the back is also back, and it pulls a neat trick: its brightness scales in real time with the display. Dimmer room, dimmer logo. Brighter room, brighter logo. Because OLED has no backlight to do that for free, Apple engineered a separate system specifically for the logo glow. As Brownlee noted, they spent a little extra battery on that.
The touchscreen works fine and that might be the problem
At the hands-on event, Brownlee got time with the machine and came away with a clear read: the touchscreen is responsive, supports all ten fingers simultaneously, handles pinch-to-zoom and four-finger space-switching gestures, and auto-magnifies small UI targets like the stoplight window controls before you tap them. Spotlight and Siri now animate out of the Dynamic Island and can be triggered by swiping down from the top of the screen instead of the keyboard shortcut. None of that is broken. None of it is a revolution either.
‘It gives great demo,’ Brownlee said, letting the Jobs quote hang in the air. The demo he saw at the event included a wall of glowing instruments that responded to touch on the laptop screen in real time, built by Apple to show off what the hardware can do. It worked. Nobody could argue with that. But when the demo ends and the machine goes back to running Mac software built for keyboards and trackpads, the touchscreen reverts to being an option rather than a rethink.
The one use case Brownlee found genuinely interesting: iOS app development. Working inside Xcode with the iPhone simulator running on screen, poking around in the simulated phone with a finger rather than a cursor, that made sense. Everything else felt like reaching, literally and figuratively.
The rest of the machine is largely unchanged. Same ports, same keyboard, same battery life, same M5 Pro and M5 Max chip options, same Touch ID fingerprint reader. No Apple Pencil support. The hinge is slightly stiffer in the middle to reduce wobble when touching the screen, but physics, as Brownlee put it, is still physics.
The moment he just kept picking it up
At the event, Brownlee found himself repeatedly lifting the new 16-inch model next to his own current MacBook Pro and setting them both down again.
Apple has spent years insisting a touchscreen laptop was ergonomically wrong. Now the touchscreen is there, it did not cost any meaningful weight or battery to add, and it is slotted in as an option alongside everything else. Brownlee is not buying the touchscreen. He is thinking hard about the pound he would stop carrying.
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