Let’s start from five years ago.
When the first all-new MacBook Pro with M1 Pro / M1 Max chips was released, I said it opened “the next five years of the Mac.” Now, once again at the last Apple event of the year, the MacBook Pro has kept its five-year appointment and ushered in its biggest iteration since the Apple silicon era began.
Unlike the complete overhaul five years ago, this time Apple did not tear the MacBook Pro down and start over: the familiar design continues, and the body has become lighter and thinner; the most important change, of course, is this PROLED XDR display—the first OLED display in Mac history, and also the first display to support touch.
Looks familiar, feels different when you pick it up
If you only look at the appearance, this MacBook Pro seems no different from before: the familiar Space Black and Silver options, with MagSafe 3, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack still on the left and right sides of the body, and the layout of the keyboard and trackpad almost unchanged.
But the moment you take this Mac out of the box, you will feel something different.
Take the 16-inch model in my hands as an example: at 1.82 kg, it is 320 grams lighter than the same-size model without the PROLED XDR display, and the thickness has dropped from 1.68 cm to 1.60 cm. Although 1.82 kg does not make this laptop what you would call lightweight, those 320 grams less are already enough to change the feeling of carrying this MacBook Pro with you.
If you care a lot about portability and also want performance, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR in this generation will be a very suitable choice. At 1.38 kg, it is even 130 grams lighter than the 15-inch MacBook Air’s 1.51 kg, and the first impression of holding this Mac is also much stronger than that of the 16-inch PROLED XDR display model.
The lighter body is mainly thanks to the thinner OLED display structure and a redesigned cooling system. To accommodate touch, Apple also redesigned the screen hinge; its damping is slightly greater than before, so when you tap the lower half of the screen it hardly wobbles, and only when you touch the upper half does it wobble slightly, while the lid can still be easily opened with one hand.
Narrower bezels also increased the screen size from 16.2 inches to 16.3 inches. However, this 0.1-inch increase is almost imperceptible in daily use; what is really easy to notice is the further narrowed bezels. Especially when displaying a pure black background, the OLED pixels turn off completely and blend into the surrounding bezels, making it look as if the screen extends all the way to the edge of the body.
It is worth mentioning that the Apple logo on the back of this MacBook Pro lights up again. This design, which disappeared after the 2016 MacBook Pro redesign, has finally returned after ten years. It has no separate switch; its brightness changes with the screen brightness, and it also turns off when the screen goes dark. For users who have used early MacBooks, this may also be one of the details in the new model most likely to evoke a sense of familiarity.
Little difference in black, quite a few changes in the screen
The brand-new screen on the MacBook Pro has a slightly awkward name: the PROLED XDR display.
Simply put, it is the first OLED screen on a Mac, using a tandem OLED structure similar to that of the iPad Pro. Two light-emitting layers together produce the image; when reaching the same brightness, each layer needs to carry a lower current, so it can balance brightness, power consumption, and service life at the same time.
However, unlike the iPad mini, which switched directly from ordinary LCD to OLED, the MacBook Pro’s original Liquid Retina XDR display, although still an LCD screen, already delivers sufficiently deep blacks when viewed head-on in daily use thanks to its excellent mini-LED backlight technology. Therefore, in most images, the improvement in black levels brought by OLED is not as obvious as one might imagine.
But the Liquid Retina XDR display relies on a mini-LED backlight, and the backlight zones can never correspond one-to-one with pixels. When playing starry skies, night scenes, or images with only a small amount of text on a black background, a slight halo still appears around bright content; when movie subtitles appear in the black bar area, you can also see the backlight zones light up and go out along with the subtitles.
Each pixel of OLED can emit light independently and can be turned off directly when displaying black. With no backlight and no zones, the halo around bright content also disappears, the edges of white text on a black background are cleaner, and shadows near highlights in dark scenes are not raised along with them. Especially when watching HDR movies with the lights off, this difference becomes very obvious.
Text on the PROLED XDR display still keeps clean edges at an oblique viewing angle.
On the Liquid Retina XDR display, halos have already appeared at the edges of text at an oblique viewing angle.
Apple rates the PROLED XDR display at a contrast ratio of 10000000:1, ten times the previous generation’s 1000000:1. However, this does not mean the actual viewing experience will improve tenfold accordingly. For most bright, colorful photos and web pages, both screens are already good enough, and it is hard to tell which is better at a glance. This number means more that when extremely dark and extremely bright content appear at the same time, OLED can keep highlights sufficiently bright while turning off the surrounding black pixels, no longer limited by backlight zones.
Compared with the tenfold increase in the contrast ratio number, the change brought by OLED response speed is actually easier to notice. The ProMotion adaptive refresh rate of the PROLED XDR display is still 10Hz to 120Hz, but the response speed of OLED pixels is an order of magnitude faster than LCD. When quickly scrolling web pages, dragging windows, or rotating the game view, there is less smearing at the edges of text and objects, and the picture looks clearer and crisper.
PROLED XDR display, shot at 120 fps, slowed to 10% speed.
Liquid Retina XDR display, shot at 120 fps, slowed to 10% speed.
For photography and design professionals, the PROLED XDR display’s support for the Adobe RGB color gamut is the more meaningful upgrade. Following the Studio Display XDR monitor, Apple has for the first time natively supported both P3 and Adobe RGB wide color gamuts at the same time on a Mac’s built-in screen. When processing photos, print designs, or doing on-site previews, Adobe RGB can display greens and cyans that P3 cannot fully cover; this also means some work no longer has to rely on an external professional monitor.
Left: MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display; both Macs are set to maximum brightness, with True Tone and Night Shift turned off.
OLED has long been nothing new, yet the MacBook Pro has only now adopted it. One important reason is that laptop screens are larger, display more static content, and are used continuously for longer periods, so the requirements for brightness uniformity, power consumption, and panel lifespan are higher than for mobile devices, and the risk of burn-in is also harder to ignore.
Apple specifically mentions in the PROLED XDR Display Technology White Paper that this panel uses an all-oxide transistor layer, and the display engine in the M5 Pro and M5 Max also adjusts each pixel in real time to maintain image uniformity and reduce the risk of burn-in. Some industry reports suggest that this panel, supplied by Samsung Display, also uses HMO (High Mobility Oxide) technology; if this information is accurate, HMO can reduce power consumption when driving large-size, high-resolution OLED panels and keep brightness and grayscale consistent across different areas.
Now with touch, but still the familiar Mac
The MacBook Pro supporting screen touch for the first time sounds like an update big enough to change the way we interact. Before actually getting hands-on, I was also curious about how Apple would design touch interaction for macOS. In actual use, the changes it brings are not as big as I imagined.
The MacBook Pro already has a trackpad that is good enough to use, and most of the interface in macOS is still designed around a pointer. When selecting text, moving windows, or operating the dense buttons and menus in professional apps, the trackpad and mouse are usually more precise and less effortful. When using a MacBook Pro, both hands are already near the keyboard and trackpad, so most of the time there is no need to deliberately lift an arm to touch the screen; if you use touch continuously, your arm is also more likely to feel fatigued.
Therefore, touch has not changed my main way of using a Mac, and it is hard for it to become a high-frequency operation. For me, its significance is not to replace the trackpad and mouse, but to serve as a supplement, coming into play in the few occasions suitable for directly operating the screen.
For example, when viewing photos, you can directly pinch to zoom on the screen, or quickly switch between several photos with your fingers; when using Xcode to debug the iPhone simulator, you can also tap, swipe, and use multi-finger gestures just like operating a real iPhone, no longer needing to use a mouse to simulate touch.
The touch experience of the new MacBook Pro is itself mature enough. The touch sensor is integrated directly into the display panel, and in actual use latency is almost imperceptible, with swiping and zooming feeling sufficiently responsive.
In terms of applications, most existing apps can complete basic touch operations such as tapping, scrolling, and dragging on this Mac without needing updates for adaptation. macOS converts touch into mouse operations that apps can recognize, so even without dedicated adaptation, most existing apps can directly use touch.
However, being able to support touch does not mean it has been optimized for touch. One of the key points of third-party app adaptation is to let the system understand what each touch is intended to accomplish. For example, in 3D modeling software, the same finger drag may mean rotating the model rather than scrolling the interface; two-finger operations may correspond to zooming, rotating, or moving the viewpoint. At the same time, the operation areas of small controls also need to be appropriately enlarged, and features that rely on mouse hover need to provide other trigger methods.
Overall, I do not think touch is an essential feature of the Mac or macOS. It is indeed more convenient in a few scenarios; but for me, this still feels more like a capability that comes with this screen: reach out and tap when it is useful, and it does not change the original way of use when it is not needed. If you do not need touch at all, you can also turn off screen touch in “System Settings,” leaving this screen with only its display function.
Visible, and also usable
The MacBook Pro redesigned in 2021 traded a “notch” for narrower screen bezels. At the time, this area did not take on more functions besides housing the camera. Especially after the iPhone introduced the Dynamic Island, voices hoping Apple would bring it to the Mac never disappeared. Five years later, the Dynamic Island has finally come to the Mac, beginning to take on information display and interaction functions.
Judging purely by appearance, the Dynamic Island is already much more natural than before: OLED can completely turn off the black pixels around the camera cutout, making it easier to blend into the interface; the smaller width also frees up space in the menu bar, allowing more icons to fit. The changes are not limited to appearance either. Live Activities such as Apple Music, Phone, AirDrop, and Timer will appear here, and can be operated directly with touch.
Arriving together with the Dynamic Island is native Live Activities in macOS. The PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro preinstalled with macOS 27.2 already supports this feature; when connected to an external display, the same content will appear in the menu bar, similar to how iPhone Live Activities are displayed on the Mac. Starting with macOS 27.3, which is currently in beta, other Mac models without the Dynamic Island will also support native Live Activity display in the menu bar.
For developers, native Live Activities on the Mac are still based on ActivityKit. The compact, minimal, and expanded states can reuse the same set of data and most of the interface, and the system then displays the Live Activity in the Dynamic Island or the menu bar according to the screen form. What developers really need to consider is what information should be presented in different states, and whether to add buttons and switches that can be operated directly. In other words, the Dynamic Island is just a new presentation method for Live Activities on the new MacBook Pro, and developers do not need to redesign a whole set of features around it.
Performance that needs no elaboration
When the base-model Mac mini, iMac, and 14-inch MacBook Pro successively adopted the next-generation Apple silicon chip M6, the PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro still uses the previously released M5 Pro / M5 Max chips, which seems to coincide with earlier rumors about adjustments to Apple silicon’s roadmap.
Back to performance itself, we are already familiar enough with how the M5 Pro / M5 Max performs. Whether it is the previous MacBook Pro or the recently released new Mac mini, both are enough for us to understand its power. Therefore, for the performance section of the PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro, I do not intend to elaborate further, and will only use two examples for a brief review.
The first is video editing. I exported a project with a duration of 4 minutes 30 seconds in Final Cut Pro; the timeline consisted of multiple clips of 4K Apple Log 2 footage, with color conversion and adjustments, subtitles, and multi-track audio added. The MacBook Pro took between 3 minutes 34 seconds and 3 minutes 36 seconds for three exports, basically consistent with the performance of the Mac mini with the same chip.
Another example is local AI. I used LM Studio on two MacBook Pros to load the same Gemma 4 31B MLX 4-bit model, and recorded the formal test results after completing a round of warm-up. The PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro had a generation speed of 11.5 tokens/s, while the M4 Pro model was 12.5 tokens/s; in actual experience there is almost no difference.
What creates the gap is the speed at which the model begins to respond: the PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro takes 0.75 seconds to generate the first token, while the M4 Pro model takes 1.01 seconds, shortening the wait by about 25.7%. This also shows that the improvement of the M5 Pro is more concentrated in the stage before the model processes the input and begins to give an answer, rather than in the subsequent continuous generation speed. When facing long articles, code, or more complex contexts, this part of the improvement will also be easier to notice.
The thinner and lighter body can still maintain the original performance, which is also related to the redesigned cooling architecture. The new airflow path directs hot air away from the screen, maintaining stable performance release under continuous high load.
Beyond thermals, the new MacBook Pro also redesigned its acoustic architecture. Although it is still a six-speaker system, both the woofer and tweeter units have been adjusted. The audio performance of previous MacBook Pro models was already excellent enough, so the changes brought by this new acoustic architecture system are not very pronounced; the more easily audible difference is that the PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro has deeper low-frequency extension, and the layering between vocals and instruments is also clearer.
It can be said that beneath the familiar exterior of the PROLED XDR version of the MacBook Pro, the internals have been completely renewed. It is still the Mac we know, but it brings quite a few new experiences.
A new Mac, a new generation
Five years ago, John Ternus, then Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Apple and a key figure in driving the Mac’s transition to Apple silicon, led the hardware team in bringing a complete renewal to the MacBook Pro. Five years later, when John Ternus, now as Apple CEO, introduced the MacBook Pro once again, this product also ushered in its own next generation.
Just like five years ago, this MacBook Pro with the PROLED XDR display brings quite a few unprecedented “firsts”: a much thinner and lighter chassis, the first OLED screen, and Dynamic Island finally arriving on the Mac. These changes that everyone is delighted to see all make the Mac experience more complete. From this perspective, I think this all-new MacBook Pro has delivered a fairly satisfactory result, and has also gotten the new generation of the Mac off to a good start.