Apple put a touchscreen on the MacBook Pro. The company announced PROLED versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro today, both with touch support and both running M5 Pro or M5 Max. Steve Jobs famously hated the idea. Apple shipped it anyway.
The twist: the classic Liquid Retina XDR models — 14-inch and 16-inch, are staying right where they are. Same chips. Same performance. No touch.
No $400 surcharge. That surcharge is the only thing separating the two tiers on silicon. The PROLED 14.2-inch and 16.3-inch displays are slightly larger diagonally thanks to thinner bezels, but they sit in the same chassis. The 16-inch PROLED model drops 0.7 pounds.
Speakers are supposedly better, though the bar was already high. Touch is optional. You can ignore it entirely. The only forced interaction is the Dynamic Island, which now responds to a finger instead of just a cursor.
Apple also offers a Nano Texture finish on the PROLED panels. It cuts glare without the contrast hit you might expect, though the source who saw both side by side said the difference wasn't immediate. PROLED peaks at 2,000 nits, which may make the matte coating unnecessary for outdoor use.
That hasn't been tested in direct sun yet. The M6 14-inch MacBook Pro was announced earlier this week. Today's PROLED models stick with M5 Pro and M5 Max. Apple is effectively running three parallel MacBook Pro lines: M6 on the entry 14-inch, M5 Pro/Max on the classic Liquid Retina 14 and 16, and M5 Pro/Max on the new PROLED 14.2 and 16.3 with touch.
Pre-order details and ship dates were not disclosed in the announcement.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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