Apple Introduces Touchscreen MacBook Pro Models With M5 Pro and M5 Max
Apple has introduced its first touchscreen MacBook Pro laptops, moving away from its traditional stance against touch displays on personal computers.
Apple CEO John Ternus presented the new portable computers during a product event held in Los Angeles.
The updated laptops feature an organic light-emitting diode display designed to provide enhanced contrast, sharpness, and brightness for creative professionals.
Display Technology and Silicon Architecture
The newly designed PROLED XDR screen incorporates tandem OLED panel hardware alongside touch-sensitive navigation capabilities.
The highest specifications use the M5 Max, including a configuration with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU. Entry configurations instead feature the M5 Pro processor.
Apple indicated that the processing power and high memory configurations are engineered to handle demanding engineering tasks, MATLAB workflows, 3D development, and artificial intelligence workloads.
The baseline touchscreen MacBook Pro model carries an entry retail price of $2,899.
CNN cited the touchscreen OLED Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x as a lower-priced alternative: its listed price was $2,100, with a $1,150 promotional offer at the time of that report.
The Economic Times reported Indian starting prices of ₹3,49,900 for the 14-inch model and ₹4,09,900 for the 16-inch configuration.
Configuration Options and Pricing Structure
Top-end configurations push retail prices significantly higher across both available chassis sizes.
A fully loaded 14-inch variant costs $14,249, which equals approximately 13.58 lakh rupees.
The 16-inch edition reaches $14,549 when fully equipped with all available hardware options, translating to around 13.87 lakh rupees.
Much of that premium stems from storage, as adding a 16TB solid-state drive alone commands an additional $7,000, or roughly 6.67 lakh rupees.
Gizmodo recalled Steve Jobs’s 2010 criticism of touchscreen notebooks, in which he described the experience as “ergonomically terrible.”
Intermediate solid-state drive tiers include a 4TB upgrade priced at $1,000 and an 8TB storage expansion costing $3,000.
Selecting 128GB of unified system memory adds $2,000, roughly 1.91 lakh rupees, while an anti-reflective nano-texture glass option costs an extra $150, or about 14,295 rupees.
Market Context and Retail Schedule
The new pricing ceiling represents a sharp climb over the prior generation, where the most expensive 16-inch MacBook Pro topped out at $10,149.
The Korea Herald identified Samsung Display as the sole panel supplier for the new 14- and 16-inch OLED MacBook Pro models.
That shift creates an increase of $4,400, or approximately 4.19 lakh rupees, between the previous generation ceiling and the new maximum configuration.
Industry observers note that broader hardware pricing pressures stem partly from ongoing memory supply constraints and surging data center infrastructure demand.
The hardware transition arrives nearly ten years after Apple first experimented with notebook touch interfaces via the Touch Bar, an input strip that the firm later phased out.
According to Quartz, macOS 27 treats ordinary screen touches as clicks for compatibility with existing applications, while giving developers updated gesture interfaces for touch-oriented software.
Customer pre-orders for the new machines begin ahead of general retail availability scheduled for November 6.