Apple MacBook Pro PROLED XDR: First Impressions

We take a look at the first touchscreen-equipped Mac The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display brings Touch to the Mac for the first time.Photo: Apple

By Mark Wherry

For the last few months - and, in some cases, years - the pipes of conjecture have been sounding with increased enthusiasm over the direction Apple might take in engineering a next-generation MacBook with even more advanced technology than the current MacBook Pro. That an OLED display would feature in a future MacBook seemed more a question of when' rather than if' - especially since the iPad Pro has featured a tandem OLED display since the M4-based model was introduced back in May 2024. But the rumblings that Apple might embrace the once-heretical notion of a touchscreen notebook were also becoming more persistent.

Apple finally answered these questions when, on 28 October 2026, the company proudly unveiled the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display at an event in Los Angeles. If it wasn't already obvious from the verbose nomenclature, this new MacBook Pro features a cutting-edge tandem OLED display with touch - both firsts for the Mac. But it also offers something that hadn't been predicted: the return of the much-loved illuminated Apple logo, a decade after it was abandoned with the debut of the MacBook Pro that introduced the oft-maligned Touch Bar.

So Pro They Named It Twice! As someone tasked with using words to describe the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, it's profoundly unfortunate there really aren't any that do justice to the visceral feeling of seeing it with your own eyes. If I were to try, I might suggest Apple have engineered a display that isn't merely stunning - it's sublime and positively coruscating. With a peak HDR brightness of 2000 nits, the PROLED XDR display can sustain 1000 nits of brightness across the entire screen for HDR and SDR content.

For musicians and audio engineers who might not feel the need for such an extravagant screen, there's an interesting characteristic of OLED technology that could prove useful when running music and audio software. Because the power consumption of an OLED display depends on what's being shown, darker content generally requires less energy than brighter images. And given the apparent popularity of Dark Mode amongst musicians and audio engineers (I seem to be a rare exception), it turns out that the dark side may be useful in ways that extend beyond the purely aesthetic. Certainly, I'll be interested to see if this makes any real-world difference to battery life when running such applications.

Another interesting attribute of the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is that, despite employing the same M5-series silicon as the standard MacBook Pro models with mini-LED-backlit IPS LCD panels, Apple's engineers have managed to make the new incarnation even more modest in its physical proportions. With a height of just 1.5cm, the new 14-inch model is half a millimetre thinner than its standard counterpart. Meanwhile, with a height of 1.6cm, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR has become more svelte by nearly a millimetre.

Perhaps the biggest surprise when first holding the new MacBook Pro was its remarkable lack of heft. With the 14-inch model weighing in at just three pounds with an M5 Pro (and 3.1 pounds with an M5 Max), it's half a pound lighter than the equivalent MacBook Pro models with IPS LCD panels. And if this doesn't sound especially impressive, consider that the 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR model is actually 0.2 to 0.3 pounds lighter than a 15-inch MacBook Air, and only 0.3 or 0.4 pounds heavier than the 13-inch model. This is the kind of difference you can feel.

In fact, holding the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR presented something of an incongruity: on the one hand, you're holding a notebook that feels as light as a MacBook Air, and yet it's Apple's most powerful portable, packed with the most advanced technology the company has ever squeezed into a notebook.

Now, you might reasonably suppose that a thinner and lighter MacBook Pro, equipped with the same silicon as the existing LCD models - which are, of course, marginally heavier and thicker - would be required to throttle performance when pushed to its limits. But you'd be wrong. Astonishingly, in my initial tests with Logic Pro, I was able to achieve the same sustained performance from a MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR as from a Mac Studio, with both systems featuring an M5 Max chip with 128GB of unified memory. However, there is a price to pay for such performance: the noise generated by the MacBook's fans becomes audibly unavoidable as they attend to the business of preventing the system from melting.

In one sense, this might be seen as a negative - until you consider the alternative. Having the system throttle the CPU's performance to maintain thermal harmony is, at least for me, a far more frustrating proposition, since it can make working on complex projects that occasionally demand bursts of processing power tediously unpredictable. And, in all likelihood, even the most taxing projects will rarely require sustained peak performance from a chip as powerful as an M5 Max.

Touch Island If Apple had stopped there, the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR would already be an incredible feat of engineering. But the new screen goes beyond simply being beautiful. Following in the footsteps of the iPhone, where the Dynamic Island replaced the notch, the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR similarly eschews the notch that has adorned MacBook screens since the introduction of the redesigned MacBook Pro in October 2021.

The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display replaces the notch with a Dynamic Island.

Although it's a seemingly small change, the Dynamic Island makes a surprisingly big differenc

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