Apple drops 16 years of touchscreen skepticism with the OLED MacBook Pro, and it starts at €3,299 💻

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Three days, four announcements, and a long-held taboo gone. Apple unveiled the OLED iPad mini on October 26, then the M6 MacBook Pro and the M6 iMac the next day, before saving the main act for October 28: the first touchscreen Mac in the company’s history.

Two different MacBook Pros are involved, and they are easy to mix up. The M6 MacBook Pro, an entry-level 14-inch, debuts the chip of the same name. The touchscreen MacBook Pro, sold in 14- and 16-inch sizes, brings the OLED touch display but keeps the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

The OLED iPad mini 📱

The OLED iPad mini, announced on October 26, has an 8.5-inch display and the A20 Pro chip, starting at €759 for Wi-Fi and €929 with cellular. It also moves the speaker under the display, which removes the grilles and allows IP67 water and dust resistance. It is the first time the line has gone OLED. Pre-orders opened on October 28, with availability on November 6.

The M6 MacBook Pro: the real news is under the hood 💻

The M6 MacBook Pro starts at €2,299 with 16 GB of unified memory and 1 TB of storage. It is the entry-level 14-inch model, with a mini-LED display and no touch. Its appeal lies elsewhere: the M6 chip. The M6 iMac, announced the same day, starts at €1,799.

Introduced by Apple on August 25, the M6 is its first chip built on a 2-nanometer process. That number refers to how finely a chip’s transistors, its tiny electronic switches, are manufactured. In principle, the finer the process, the more power or energy efficiency a chip can deliver. It first appeared in the Mac mini in August; now it reaches the laptop.

The change goes beyond the manufacturing process. The processor goes from 10 to 12 cores: two “super cores,” four performance cores and six energy-efficient cores. The graphics processor also gains two cores, for a total of 12. Apple claims up to 30% faster graphics and up to 25% better results on some on-device AI workloads. On the processor alone, the maximum announced gain is 20% in multi-core work.

The biggest jump is in AI. The Neural Engine, the circuit that runs AI directly on the device, is doubled: two 16-core blocks, with performance up to 1.9 times that of the previous generation. Each graphics core also gets its own neural accelerator. On-device AI runs without sending your data to a remote server, which helps when your connection is slow or unstable.

To tempt owners of older machines to upgrade, Apple says the M6 delivers up to 11 times the graphics performance and 13 times the AI performance of an M1 MacBook Pro. One limit remains: this chip is still less powerful than the M5 Pro and M5 Max, despite its newer architecture. The M6 is the most advanced chip on paper, but not the most powerful in the lineup.

The touchscreen MacBook Pro: Apple drops a long-held taboo 👆

Now to the headline announcement: the touchscreen MacBook Pro, unveiled on October 28. It comes in 14- and 16-inch sizes with an OLED display, and it uses the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips already found in the current models, not the M6. It is a separate machine from the M6 MacBook Pro covered above.

In 2010, Steve Jobs called the touchscreen laptop an ergonomic disaster. Two years later, Tim Cook compared merging a tablet and a laptop to merging a toaster and a refrigerator. Sixteen years on, Apple is doing the opposite of what it preached.

Touch does not replace the keyboard or the trackpad. You can scroll a page, pinch to zoom or drag items with your finger. The touch layer is built directly into the OLED panel, so you cannot add it or remove it when you buy. Existing apps need no update, because macOS converts a finger tap into a click.

That built-in touch would not exist without the display that carries it, and the display is what changes the machine most.

What the ProLED XDR display changes on the touchscreen MacBook Pro ✨

Apple calls the touchscreen MacBook Pro’s display “ProLED XDR.” It uses tandem OLED technology, already seen on the iPad Pro. Apple claims peak brightness of 2,000 nits, adaptive refresh up to 120 Hz and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, with an optional nano-texture finish to cut glare. Those are the manufacturer’s numbers: no independent testing is available yet.

The chassis has changed too. The 14-inch drops from 1.55 kg (3.4 lb) to 1.38 kg (3.0 lb), and the 16-inch from 2.14 kg (4.7 lb) to 1.82 kg (4.0 lb). The notch gives way to a Dynamic Island, already familiar from the iPhone, and the illuminated Apple logo returns on the lid. On the performance side: up to 128 GB of memory, up to 16 TB of storage and a claimed 24 hours of battery life.

What does touch cost? 💶

Here comes the awkward part. In France, the touchscreen MacBook Pro starts at €3,299 for the 14-inch and €3,899 for the 16-inch, with a cut-down version of the M5 Pro chip. The M5 Max pushes the bill to €5,199 (14-inch) and €5,599 (16-inch). Against mini-LED models with the same chip, the gap looks like this:

At the fixed CFA franc rate, the 14-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro comes to roughly 2.16 million FCFA, and the 16-inch with the M5 Max to roughly 3.67 million. These are French market prices: what you pay in Cameroon will depend on resellers.

The premium therefore buys OLED and touch together, with no way to choose one without the other. According to MacRumors, Apple has pulled the current mini-LED models from its lineup. If that holds, the 16-inch would have no cheaper alternative, since the M6 only comes in 14 inches.

Who is it for, and for what? 🌍

Apple showcases touch in Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro and Pixelmator Pro, and names Photoshop, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve and Blender as compatible apps. Video editors, designers and musicians are therefore the first target for the touchscreen MacBook Pro. For a student or professional who writes, crunches numbers and browses, the €2,299 M6 MacBook Pro covers the essentials. macg

A question of use more than technology 🤔

Apple did not invent the touchscreen laptop: others have sold them for years. It is adopting the idea its own way, with a premium display and a premium price. Pre-orders are open, with availability on November 6. Independent reviews will show whether touch earns its place in daily use or stays a keynote talking point.

Your turn: Would you actually reach for the screen on a Mac, or are the keyboard and trackpad enough for you? Tell us in the comments.