THE CRUNCH
The first reviews of Apple's MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display are in, and the verdict is consistent: the touchscreen is the least interesting thing about it. Engadget and The Verge both frame the machine as a full redesign of Apple's premium laptops, built around the company's first OLED screens in a MacBook Pro, a slimmer body and a big weight cut, with touch support bolted on in a deliberately basic way.
The numbers back the redesign story. The 14-inch model now weighs 3 pounds, down from 3.7 on the standard MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch drops from 4.7 to 4 pounds, thanks to the lighter OLED panels and reworked cooling and internals. The displays reach up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness and 1,000 nits sustained, which Engadget calls the brightest OLED screens it has seen in laptops. Both reviewers found the touch layer underwhelming in practice: interactions register as mouse clicks, there is no Apple Pencil support, and The Verge concludes it does not meaningfully change the laptop experience.
The catch is price. The 14-inch PROLED model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, and The Verge puts the premium at roughly $400 over a similarly specced standard Pro. Both machines run M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, and The Verge notes Apple redesigned the thermals to direct heat away from the OLED panel, which can degrade if it runs too hot for too long. The screens also gain a Dynamic Island in place of the notch, though Engadget found it makes little visual difference.
For contrast, the standard 14-inch MacBook Pro with the new M6 chip, announced by Apple on 27 October, keeps the chassis the company has used since 2021 and starts at $1,999. Tom's Hardware found it a steady rather than exciting update: Geekbench gains of about 10% single-core and 18% multi-core over the M5, unchanged SSD speeds, and the same mini LED display, with Thunderbolt 4 rather than Thunderbolt 5. It still beat the Windows laptops it was tested against in productivity benchmarks.