Apple has announced a new MacBook Pro with what it calls a PROLED XDR Display, a tandem OLED screen that also supports touch for the first time on a Mac. It comes in 14- and 16-inch sizes with M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, starts at £2,899 in the UK, $2,899 in the US and €3,299 in Germany, and arrives on Friday 6 November, according to Apple’s press release published during its Pro and tell event on 28 October.
The laptop also brings the Dynamic Island to the Mac, where it becomes the home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. Apple says the 14-inch model now weighs 3 pounds (about 1.36kg), half a pound less than before, and the 16-inch model 4 pounds (about 1.81kg), 0.7 pounds lighter.
It sits above the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 that Apple announced by press release on 27 October. That cheaper model keeps a Liquid Retina XDR display and has no touch screen, while the new OLED models use M5 Pro and M5 Max rather than an M6-generation chip.
The display
Apple says the PROLED XDR display reaches up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, with a contrast ratio of 10,000,000:1 and a variable refresh rate from 10Hz to 120Hz. It covers both the P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces, and Apple claims more than 80 per cent of Rec. 2020. Thinner borders mean the 16-inch model now has a 16.3-inch screen and the 14-inch model a 14.2-inch screen. A nano-texture option, now etched into the cover glass, is available to cut glare.
“PROLED XDR is the world’s best laptop display,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer. “And with the magic of Touch coming to MacBook Pro, combined with the game-changing performance of M5 Pro and M5 Max, we’ve created a whole new way for pros to interact with their content.”
Touch and the Dynamic Island
The touch sensor is built into the display panel rather than layered on top, which Apple says reduces latency. Users can swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom and double-tap a window to fill the screen, and Apple has redesigned the hinge so the screen stays steadier when touched. Existing apps work with touch straight away because macOS translates touches into clicks, and Apple names Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, Blender and Canva among the third-party apps adding touch support, which it says will arrive later this year.
In Apple Creator Studio, Logic Pro gets an on-screen Multi-Touch keyboard with chord and drum pads, Final Cut Pro lets editors mark ranges, drop clips into place and pinch to zoom in on a cut, and Pixelmator Pro lets users draw and paint directly on the canvas.
Performance, battery and ports
M5 Pro and M5 Max both have a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core, and Apple says M5 Max can run large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the device. Memory goes up to 128GB and storage up to 16TB. Apple quotes up to 24 hours of battery life and says the laptop can charge to 50 per cent in 30 minutes with fast charging.
The ports are three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe and a headphone jack. M5 Pro supports up to three external displays and M5 Max up to four. The six-speaker sound system has new woofers that Apple says give 50 per cent deeper bass, and there is a 12MP Center Stage camera.
The MacBook Pro ships with macOS 27, including Siri AI, which Apple says is available in beta in macOS 27.2 in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Apple’s footnote says Siri AI is unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, but does not list the Mac among those exceptions.
Prices and availability
In the UK, the 14-inch model with M5 Pro starts at £2,899 including VAT and the 16-inch at £3,399, according to Apple’s UK newsroom. With M5 Max, the 14-inch starts at £4,499 and the 16-inch at £4,799. Education prices start at £2,749. In the US, the same four models start at $2,899, $3,399, $4,499 and $4,799 before sales tax, according to Apple’s US newsroom.
In Germany, the M5 Pro models start at €3,299 (14-inch) and €3,899 (16-inch) including VAT, and the M5 Max models at €5,119 and €5,599, according to Apple’s German newsroom. In Ireland they start at €3,399, €3,999, €5,299 and €5,699, according to Apple’s Irish newsroom, and in Australia the range starts at A$4,599 including GST, according to Apple’s Australian newsroom.
Pre-orders opened on 28 October on apple.com and in the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, France and Australia. Deliveries and in-store availability start on Friday 6 November. Apple sells its 70W, 96W and 140W power adapters separately for £59, £79 and £99 in the UK; it had not yet updated its specification pages to say which countries get one in the box.