Apple Ships First OLED Touch MacBook Pro at $2,899 and Up

Apple has put its first OLED display and first touchscreen in a MacBook Pro, and the entry price is $2,899 for a 14-inch model with an M5 Pro chip. The 16-inch review configuration, with an M5 Max, 128GB of memory and 2TB of storage, costs $7,399 as configured, and the PROLED XDR option adds $400 over mini-LED MacBook Pros carrying identical processors.

The display is the core of the story. The 16.3-inch tandem OLED panel runs at 3,472 by 2,266 resolution, 254 pixels per inch, and a variable refresh rate of 10 to 120 Hz. In instrumented testing it covered 83.6% of DCI-P3 by volume and 118% of sRGB, slightly below the mini-LED version on paper, but the reviewer judged it the best notebook screen he has seen, with deep blacks and vivid color. It measured 542.6 nits in SDR testing and 1,964 nits in a 40% HDR test. That SDR figure falls short of the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra's 944-nit mini-LED panel, yet the OLED still looked better side by side, partly because the Surface suffers light bleed and too few local dimming zones.

What else changed in the chassis?

The OLED stack and a redesigned cooling path cut the 16-inch model to 4.1 pounds with the M5 Max, against 4.7 pounds for the Liquid Retina versions. The 14-inch drops from 3.5 to 3 pounds. The 16-inch system is 16 mm thick, only 0.8 mm slimmer than the mini-LED model. Ports stay the same: MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SD card reader and a 3.5 mm jack.

The notch is gone, replaced by the Dynamic Island from recent iPhones, which shows alerts and ongoing activities and expands when the cursor slides behind it. The lid again carries a glowing Apple logo, powered deliberately this time because OLED lights pixels only when needed. Bezels are thinner, stretching the screen to 16.3 inches, now rounded on all four sides.

How does touch actually work?

Apple says the "touch sensor is built directly into the display panel — not layered on top of it," matching the approach of flagship Windows laptops. macOS 27 Golden Gate adds touch-friendly spacing in menus, expanding window controls, Siri by swiping down from the Dynamic Island, and familiar trackpad gestures such as pinch to zoom and three-finger Mission Control. The reviewer found touch useful mainly for iPad apps running natively, the Xcode iPhone simulator and iPhone Mirroring, while Final Cut Pro and Cinema 4D gained nothing over mouse and keyboard. Touch can be disabled in accessibility settings. There is still no Face ID.

Is the performance competitive?

On Geekbench 6 the machine scored 4,353 single-core and 29,430 multi-core, ahead of RTX Spark laptops from Microsoft and Lenovo and the Intel-based Dell XPS 16. It transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 1 minute 43 seconds and finished the Xcode compile benchmark in 80 seconds, 7 seconds faster than an earlier 14-inch M5 Max system. In Cinebench 2026 stress testing, high performance mode held scores between 9,479 and 9,647 where the default mode throttled toward 8,050. Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 36.24 fps at 1920 by 1200 with ray tracing ultra, and 94.20 fps on the MetalFX preset.

Battery life is 15 hours 57 minutes on the standard web test, ahead of the Lenovo Pro 9n at 10:30 and the Dell XPS 16 at 13:03, but short of the mini-LED 14-inch M5 Max machine at nearly 18 hours. The keyboard reached 106.6 degrees Fahrenheit under stress. Memory sits on the chip and storage is soldered, so buyers must choose their spec up front, and upgrades are steep: $1,000 between the 2TB and 4TB tiers, and $7,000 for 16TB.

The reviewer's verdict is that the machine is an accumulation of small improvements rather than a redesign, and that far more Mac users deserve a screen this good. Until OLED reaches cheaper models, the best displays in the Mac lineup stay locked behind a $2,899 floor and steep upgrade pricing.