Apple unveils first touchscreen MacBook Pro with M5 chips from £2,899

Apple has revealed a new MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, the first Mac laptop to carry one. The machine goes on sale on 6 November in 14- and 16-inch sizes, priced from £2,899 and rising to £4,499 at the top of the range.

The timing carries a long memory. Sixteen years ago Steve Jobs called touchscreen laptops \"ergonomically terrible,\" and now the company that stood by the trackpad has reversed course with a feature it calls Touch, built into the display panel rather than layered over it.

The screen is a PROLED XDR panel that Apple claims is \"the world's best laptop display.\" It runs on tandem OLED technology managed by the display engine's algorithms, which Apple says control each pixel in real time and keep brightness and grayscale uniform across the whole surface.

Under the lid are M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, joined by up to 128 gigabytes of memory and 16 terabytes of storage. Battery life reaches 24 hours. The machine is thinner and lighter than the previous MacBook Pro, with the 14-inch model weighing three pounds and the 16-inch four.

\"The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display is a monumental step forward for the Mac,\" said Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer. He described the addition of Touch as a new way for professionals to interact with their content and take workflows to a new level.

Srouji also framed the laptop as the product of Apple silicon, hardware and software working together, adding that \"there's simply nothing else like it.\" The claim is the boldest in a launch built around a feature the company itself once rejected in public.

Touch translates familiar gestures to the Mac. Users can swipe to scroll a webpage, pinch to zoom into a photograph, drag and drop slides in a presentation, and double-tap a window to make it fill the screen. The sensor's position in the panel is meant to give the feel of touching content itself.

Because the touch sensor is inside the display rather than above it, Apple redesigned the hinge for stability and added real-time video stabilisation so the camera feed stays smooth when someone is on a video call and reaching for the screen throughout the conversation.

macOS translates touches into clicks automatically, which means a long list of existing apps work with Touch from the start. Apple names Adobe Lightroom, Blender, Maxon Cinema 4D and ZBrush, Notion, Canva, Zoom, and Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint among them.

Apple is pitching the screen directly at creative work. Graphic designers get the entire display as a drawing surface, no longer limited by the trackpad's area. Musicians can play software instruments onscreen, and app developers can test how Touch behaves in their iOS and iPadOS apps right on the MacBook Pro.

What the PROLED XDR display changes

The PROLED XDR panel pairs OLED technology with the algorithms that run light across it, which Apple says brings true-to-life color and what it calls unparalleled brightness and contrast. The design is built to reduce the internal reflections common in older OLED displays.

Apple also points to manufacturing as part of the picture, with a process it describes as meticulous and per-panel calibration meant to keep every display consistent. That level of attention to color uniformity is aimed at the same professionals who already depend on calibrated Apple screens for editing.

The laptop carries a six-speaker sound system tuned for deeper bass and clearer sound than previous models, and it borrows the Dynamic Island search and notification feature already familiar from the iPhone. All of it arrives alongside the touchscreen rather than behind it.

Jobs dismissed the whole category in 2010, and the company kept notebooks out of touch for a decade and a half as rival Windows machines made the feature standard on premium hardware.

The Mac itself has long been the tool of choice for the kind of professional creatives this launch addresses, and the M-series silicon has only deepened that through successive generations. This model is the first to couple that processing power with direct touch on the display itself.

The result lands at the high end of Apple's laptop pricing, with the £2,899 starting point sitting above the entry MacBook Air line and the M5 Max configurations pushing toward £4,499. Those figures put the Touch feature where Apple's pro customers already spend.

The launch sets the machine for an imminent arrival: pre-orders open now and shipping begins on 6 November. That leaves little time for the kind of long evaluation creative professionals usually give a machine, but the specification sheet makes the argument without waiting.