MacBook Pro (PROLED XDR Display)

Apple (technology overview, Hacker News, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, ArsTechnica, Slashdot):

Apple today introduced the all-new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, featuring breakthrough tandem OLED technology that delivers game-changing front-of-screen performance. Available in 14- and 16-inch models, MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display offers a visual experience unlike any other, transforming pro workflows with up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, an industry-leading 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio for exceptional detail, a 120Hz variable refresh rate, and a wider color gamut covering both P3 and Adobe RGB for brilliant colors. The new MacBook Pro also introduces intuitive Touch capabilities on the Mac for the first time, opening up a whole new dimension for pros to interact with their content, from manipulating 3D models to playing musical instruments onscreen. The Dynamic Island now comes to Mac, serving as the home for Spotlight, Live Activities, and Siri AI. And with up to 24 hours of battery life in thinner and much lighter 3- and 4-pound designs, MacBook Pro is more portable than ever, empowering pros to take their work wherever inspiration strikes. Featuring M5 Pro and M5 Max, Apple’s most powerful chips ever built for a pro laptop, along with up to 128GB of unified memory and now up to 16TB of blazing-fast storage, the new MacBook Pro delivers speed and capability for the most demanding workflows. Crafted specifically for the Mac, every touch interaction feels incredibly responsive and refined. Everyday tasks are simple and intuitive, allowing users to scroll through a webpage with a natural swipe; pinch to zoom in on a photo; drag and drop slides from one presentation to another; and double-tap a window to fill the screen, or flick to tile it into place. And the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel — not layered on top of it — reducing latency so users feel like they’re touching the content itself. Touch also introduces entirely new ways of working for pro users. Graphic designers can now use the entire display as their canvas, no longer constrained by the area of the trackpad when drawing; musicians can play software instruments right onscreen; and app developers can test how Touch performs in their iOS and iPadOS apps directly on the MacBook Pro display. The 14-inch MacBook Pro now weighs half a pound less at 3 pounds, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs just 4 pounds — 0.7 pounds lighter than before. Both models feature a slimmer design enabled by OLED’s more efficient display stack, with the 16-inch model nearly a millimeter thinner and the 14-inch model half a millimeter thinner.

Juli Clover:

Pricing on the MacBook Pro starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch model.

The base configurations have an M5 Pro with 24 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD.

This all sounds technically impressive, but these Macs don’t really interest me. I don’t need the better display; I rarely use the internal one, anyway. And I don’t want to touch my display; it seems less efficient, with horrible ergonomics, and I don’t want to get gunk on it.

I do like that the new MacBook Pros are a bit lighter, seemingly with no compromises.

The Dynamic Island does seem better than the Notch, but the problem with the Notch is mostly software, not hardware. There’s no indication that the software will be better, though at least the Dynamic Island is smaller.

What would I rather see in a new MacBook Pro? A smaller trackpad, a rounder front edge, more USB ports, Face ID, cellular.

John Gruber:

So I’m just wondering if tomorrow’s new touchscreen OLED MacBooks aren’t replacements for the current MacBook Pros, but instead are the start of a new MacBook family with another name. I don’t think they’d call them MacBook “Duos”, because they’re not two-in-one devices. MacBook “Ultras”, maybe — with the same specs as the MacBook Pros but more expensive displays? But “Ultra” seems like a wrong name for a MacBook because Apple’s M-series Ultra chips are (to date at least) desktop only. It’d be weird if the M5 Ultra is exclusive to the Mac Studio while the MacBook “Ultra” maxes out with the M5 Max. So maybe they just are the new MacBook Pros and this first OLED/touch generation uses the same chips as the ones from March?

“Ultra” never made sense, so I wondered whether Apple would add some other moniker like “Touch” or “Studio.” It turns out not, but “PROLED XDR Display” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so something like “MacBook Touch” may end up being the defacto name, anyway.

Hartley Charlton:

The iconic glowing rear Apple logo is returning to the MacBook Pro with the latest model, Apple today announced.

John Voorhees:

The MacBook Pro does not, however, support the Apple Pencil.

John Ternus:

We’re glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro. You’ve gotta touch it to believe it.

Tim Cook:

We brought Touch to the Mac!

Steven Levy (MacRumors):

This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.” When I met with Apple executives Johny Srouji and Greg Joswiak this week to discuss the touchscreen MacBook Pro, you bet I invoked Schiller’s list of concerns. (Apple’s reps chose not to make Schiller, who now holds the title of “Apple Fellow,” available for an interview. In fact, they laughed when I asked.) It wasn’t only Schiller drawing a red line. In 2021, Ternus told journalist Joanna Stern, “The Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven’t really felt a reason to change that.” “Ten years is a very, very long time,” says Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “Many things have changed, whether it’s the display technology, the custom silicon, et cetera.” Eventually, he told me, the confluence of chips, display tech, and software architecture “met our bar.” Joswiak, who holds Schiller’s old title of SVP of worldwide marketing, concedes that touch was overdue, at least for users with sophisticated needs. Its pro customers—engineers, scientists, software developers, and media creators—were impatient with Apple for its failure to let them interact directly with the screen. “Most pros own an iPad, and almost every pro owns an iPhone,” Joswiak says. “So this is something that they’re natural with. There’s a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch.”

Jason Snell:

Another question I had coming into this event was just how much effort Apple would make to adapt the macOS interface for touch. The answer is: A little, but not a lot. When you touch the screen, the interface makes subtle adaptations—more spacing in menus, more feedback when selecting and dragging items—but what it doesn’t do is flip into some new Touch Mode that looks and behaves totally unlike the Mac.

Federico Viticci:

Here is the same contextual menu on macOS activated via pointer (left) and touch macOS automatically detects touch input and spaces out items a little bit more in the UI

TheRealAlex:

So I need to know what is the reason you need a Touchscreen on your Laptop? What are you doing?

Paul Haddad:

The PROLED (🤮) display seems to have all the expected specs for a high end OLED. The sub pixel layout is unusual, at least I haven’t seen any others with this style. It’s an interesting choice since standard RGB is the next “big thing” with desktop OLEDs. I wonder if Apple re-added sub-pixel rendering to the OS or just don’t bother since the PPI is high enough to maybe not matter.