Apple spent years dismissing touchscreen laptops, with Steve Jobs once calling them “ergonomically terrible.”¹ Yet ahead of its Los Angeles launch event, the expectation was clear: after a decade of resistance, Apple was preparing to let Mac users “tap and swipe at a MacBook screen.”²

That break arrived on October 28, when Apple unveiled its first touchscreen MacBook Pro at its “Pro and tell” event. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, with preorders opening immediately ahead of a November 6 release.³ Apple’s pitch goes beyond touch: the new PROLED XDR tandem OLED panel promises up to 2,000 nits of peak SDR brightness, a 120Hz refresh rate and a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. The machines are also thinner and lighter, at 3 pounds for the 14-inch and 4 pounds for the 16-inch.³

In early hands-ons, the screen—not the ability to poke at macOS—emerged as the headline feature. One reviewer found its “saturation and contrast” remarkable, while the lighter 16-inch model felt better balanced despite retaining the familiar MacBook Pro build.¹ The return of the glowing Apple logo added a touch of nostalgia, too.¹

But the practical case for touch remains unsettled. Another hands-on found that swiping desktops, dragging files and pinching to zoom work as expected, yet said there was “not much you can do with it that you couldn’t already do with trackpad gestures.”⁴ Without tablet mode or Apple Pencil support, this is still a conventional laptop—just one that now invites fingerprints.

Then comes the bill. A maximally configured 16-inch model can reach $14,549, according to a post amplified by Elon Musk—more than the cited price of a used 2020 Tesla Model 3.Elon Musk (elonmusk)⁵ Apple has finally made touch a Mac feature; buyers must decide whether OLED polish makes the premium worth touching.