MacBook Touch reviews: OLED wows, touch is a bonus at $2,899

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The first full reviews of Apple’s first touchscreen Mac landed this morning, one day before it reaches stores, and the verdict splits right down the spec sheet. Reviewer after reviewer calls its tandem OLED panel the best display Apple has ever shipped in a laptop. The touch layer on top of it is the part they keep forgetting to use.

The formal name is MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, 14-inch and 16-inch, and everyone is just calling it the MacBook Touch. Both sizes run the mini-LED MacBook Pro’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, behind a tandem OLED touchscreen, with a Dynamic Island in place of the notch. Prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch, preorders are open, and the laptops arrive Friday, November 6. We haven’t tested one yet. What follows is the first wave’s verdict.

Price: $2,899.00
Where to buy: Apple

The display is the whole story

Start with the screen, because every reviewer did. Bloomberg’s Chris Welch calls the dual-layer tandem OLED panel “genuinely striking,” noticeably brighter than the LCD models and a clear step past mini-LED on contrast, since each pixel shuts off completely for black. His early worry about OLED uniformity “quickly vanished,” and he flags a win for photographers in the wider color range. Mashable’s Timothy Beck Werth goes shorter: the display “absolutely slaps.”

Pocket-lint’s Craig Donaldson, testing the 16-inch, calls it “without a doubt, the best laptop display I’ve ever used,” and calls the jump from his M1 Pro MacBook Pro night and day. The specs back up the praise: 2,000 nits of peak brightness for HDR and SDR content, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and coverage of both the P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces. Even The Verge’s David Pierce, the most measured voice in the wave, recommends the new models on the OLED panel alone.

Touch works best in small moments

Nobody calls the touchscreen bad. They call it occasional, and list the moments it earned its keep. Pierce found touch handier than he expected: spreading his fingers to zoom into a photo he’s editing is “vastly easier” than click-dragging on the trackpad, and his favorite use is collaborative, two people swiping and tapping at one screen instead of crowding a trackpad.

Gizmodo’s Kyle Barr singles out iPhone Mirroring, where swiping up from the bottom of the mirrored phone feels like using the real thing, though the touch response lags the actual iPhone. Pocket-lint’s Donaldson used touch more than he expected, helped by the Dynamic Island putting controls a tap away. Marques Brownlee’s first-impressions video found the touch hardware responsive and smooth, gestures working as advertised.

WIRED’s Luke Larsen is the counterweight. Deep in work, he writes, “I completely forget the touchscreen. It just has no place in my workflows,” and the exceptions are small ones: swiping away a notification, thumb-scrolling a feed on the couch. Brownlee reached the same place from the other direction: “I’d upgrade for the weight savings before I would for the touchscreen.”

The complaints are consistent too

The loudest complaint is an absence. The Apple Pencil does not work with this screen at all, a point Pierce makes flatly, and Brownlee, Trusted Reviews, and Tom’s Guide’s Mark Spoonauer all raise on their own. Basic touch behavior is missing too: Pierce notes there’s no onscreen keyboard when you tap a text field and no copy-and-paste pop-up when you tap a word, because macOS and its apps still assume a cursor.

Apple is candid about the timeline. The named third-party touch apps, from Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve to Blender and the Office suite, arrive later this year, and the company concedes it’s “only getting started” adapting macOS to touch. Spoonauer’s version is the launch’s open question: “We’ll have to see how well touch works with third-party apps.”

Then there’s the price. The $2,899 start is $400 more than the same-chip mini-LED MacBook Pro at $2,499, and the premium buys the OLED panel and touch together. Donaldson is “not yet convinced” the extra $400 is worth it. The screen and the weight savings carry the upgrade case, not your fingertips.

Reviewers split on the hinge and the speakers

Two fights are still open. The first is wobble: Apple redesigned the hinge for touch, Trusted Reviews found it clearly stiffer (its camera held still in a tap test where the M6 bobbed), Donaldson calls it reduced rather than eliminated, and Brownlee still lists a moving screen as an objection. The second is sound: Apple claims 50 percent deeper bass from the redesigned six-speaker system, and Welch found it true to a fault, tremendous for movies but too boomy for music and podcasts, with no easy way to dial the low end back. Nobody else weighed in on audio.

Should you buy it now or wait

The first wave’s advice sorts cleanly by what you’re buying. If your work lives on the screen, photo editing, video, color grading, the reviewers say this is the one, the panel first and the weight cut second. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found the lighter 16-inch “feels less like a tank,” enough to reconsider his usual 14-inch pick. Performance is a known quantity: Donaldson’s Geekbench 7 run on an M5 Pro returned 3,665 single-core and 33,237 multi-core, matching the current line.

If touch itself is your reason, wait. The app support that would make touch a workflow instead of a garnish is a later-this-year story by Apple’s own account, and Apple’s 24-hour battery claim is still untested by the whole wave. If neither moves you, the exits are priced clearly: the mini-LED MacBook Pro with the same M5 Pro chip is $2,499, and Apple’s new M6 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 without touch.

Price: $2,899.00
Where to buy: Apple

The first touchscreen Mac turns out to be two launches in one box: the first OLED Mac, which reviewers call a genuine leap, and the first touch Mac, a promising extra priced like a headline. The display verdict is settled. The touch verdict belongs to the apps landing over the next few months.

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