Apple has released its first touchscreen laptop, the MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR Display, on Wednesday.
The 14-inch and 16-inch models use tandem OLED panels, which stack two layers of light-emitting material, specified at up to 2,000 nits of brightness and a 10m:1 contrast ratio.
That is a step up from the current Liquid Retina XDR mini-LED displays, rated at up to 1,600 nits peak HDR brightness.
The laptops run on Apple's M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, not the newer M6 silicon the company has just put in other Macs. The display and touch interaction, not the processor, are the headline change.
They go on sale on 6 November. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, both increases on existing models.
A change of position
"Yes, for the very first time, we are bringing touch to the Mac," chief executive John Ternus said in Los Angeles.
It reverses Apple's long-held position that touch belonged on the iPad and iPhone, not the Mac.
Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, argued in 2018 that touch would tire users on a laptop. Ternus himself defended the Mac's "indirect input" design as recently as 2021.
A weak market
The launch comes as the laptop market endures one of its worst slumps, according to CNBC.
IDC expects global shipments to fall 11% this year. Third-quarter PC shipments dropped 20% year on year, and Apple's own fell 11%.
IDC says only 17% of notebooks shipped globally this year have touchscreens, and touch models carry slightly lower average selling prices.
It is Apple's latest launch under Ternus, in a run that has included new M6 versions of the MacBook Pro and iMac, an iPad mini, and September's iPhone Duo and HomeView smart speaker.
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