Apple brings touch to the Mac: everything from Pro and Tell week

Felix Laurent 28 Oct 2026 6 min read

big tech

Apple put touch on the Mac for the first time. At its Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles on October 28, it unveiled a MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED "PROLED XDR" display. The touch sensor is built into the panel. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899.

The launch closed a busy week. In the two days before the event, Apple also refreshed the iPad mini, the iMac and the 14-inch MacBook Pro. It shipped two AI updates as well: Siri AI in five more languages and new AI tools in Creator Studio.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display brings touch to the Mac

The new display is the main story of the event. Apple says the panel reaches 2,000 nits of peak brightness in both HDR and SDR. It quotes a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a refresh rate that adapts from 10Hz to 120Hz.

Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, called it "the world's best laptop display." The panel covers P3 and Adobe RGB, plus more than 80% of Rec. 2020.

The specs around the screen changed too. Apple lists these numbers for the 14-inch and 16-inch models:

Chips: M5 Pro or M5 Max, up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 16TB of storage
Battery: up to 24 hours, with 50% in 30 minutes on fast charging
Weight: 3 lb for the 14-inch, 4 lb for the 16-inch, which is 0.7 lb lighter than before
Thickness: 0.5 mm thinner (14-inch) and nearly 1 mm thinner (16-inch)
Ports: three Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, SDXC, MagSafe and a headphone jack

The notch is gone as well. That change matters as much as touch for everyday use.

Dynamic Island replaces the notch on the Mac

The iPhone's Dynamic Island now sits at the top of the Mac display. Apple says it becomes the home for Spotlight, Live Activities and Siri AI. A tap accepts an AirDrop request or pauses music.

Cult of Mac and AppleInsider both point out a second throwback: the glowing Apple logo on the lid returns. Apple laptops had it from 1999 to 2015.

The island is a touch target by design. That raises the bigger question of how macOS handles fingers at all.

How touch works in macOS 27

Apple did not build a separate touch mode. In macOS 27, the system translates touches into clicks, so many existing apps work with touch on day one.

Gestures follow the iPad. A swipe scrolls, a pinch zooms, a double tap makes a window fill the screen and a flick tiles it. The keyboard and trackpad stay, and Apple says touch works "in tandem" with them.

Third-party apps get dedicated touch updates later this year. Apple names a long list of them:

Office and design: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Notion, Canva and Zoom
Photo and video: Adobe Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve
3D and audio: Blender, Maxon Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Shapr3D and djay Pro

Forbes' Ben Sin, who had a short hands-on, wrote that the gestures feel familiar to iPad users. Cult of Mac notes a limit: Apple Pencil does not work on the screen. That is where the skepticism starts.

Apple spent 16 years arguing against a touch Mac

The idea is not new, and Apple's own founder rejected it. In 2010, Steve Jobs said "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" and called the idea ergonomically terrible. Engineers call the fatigue of holding an arm up to a screen "gorilla arm."

Cult of Mac reported "a great deal of pre-launch resistance" to a touch Mac. Tom's Guide's live blog doubted touch without a convertible design, and MacRumors forum users worried about fingerprints on a glossy panel.

Apple's answer is to keep touch secondary. The keyboard and trackpad remain the main input, and touch is an extra layer. The price is the harder sell.

The touch MacBook Pro costs about $700 more

Cult of Mac counts the new base prices as roughly $700 above the previous models' launch prices. It links the jump to costlier OLED panels, touch assembly and rising memory and storage prices.

Apple's US starting prices for the four configurations are below.

Model	Chip	Starting price	With education savings
14-inch	M5 Pro	$2,899	$2,749
16-inch	M5 Pro	$3,399	$3,199
14-inch	M5 Max	$4,499	$4,199
16-inch	M5 Max	$4,799	$4,499

Cult of Mac puts the most expensive build at $7,549. Preorders opened on October 28, and deliveries start on November 6.

For buyers who do not need touch, Apple released cheaper Macs two days earlier.

Earlier in the week: M6 iMac and MacBook Pro 14

On October 27, Apple moved the iMac and the base 14-inch MacBook Pro to its new M6 chip. Both keep the existing designs and displays.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999. It has a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU and 16GB of memory as standard. Apple claims up to 24 hours of battery life, "the longest ever in a Mac."

Apple also claims the chip is up to 30% faster in graphics and up to 25% faster in AI workloads than M5. The display is the familiar Liquid Retina XDR at up to 1,600 nits, without touch.

The iMac with M6 starts at $1,499 in seven colors. Apple claims up to 5x faster on-device AI and up to 2x faster graphics than the M4 model. Every speed figure here is Apple's own testing.

Both Macs ship on November 6, the same day as one more redesign.

Earlier in the week: an OLED iPad mini

The iPad mini, announced on October 26, got what Apple calls its biggest update ever. It now has an 8.5-inch OLED display with bezels 24% thinner than before.

The rest of the changes are listed below:

Chip: A20 Pro on a 2-nanometer process, with up to 4.5x faster AI performance by Apple's count
Body: 5.4 mm thin, with IP67 water and dust resistance
Display: up to 1,200 nits peak and a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, with a nano-texture option
Price: $699 for Wi-Fi and $849 for cellular

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had warned that the OLED model would be considerably more expensive, as 9to5Mac reported on October 11. The final price is $699.

The iPad mini also ships with Siri AI built in. That feature got its own update the same day.

Apple's AI updates: Siri AI and Creator Studio

On October 26, Siri AI came out in beta in five more languages: French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Chinese (traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese are due by the end of the year.

Siri AI can search personal context across mail, messages and photos and act on what is on screen. It is still unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS.

A day later, Apple added AI features across its Creator Studio apps. These are the main ones:

Logic Pro: an assistant that starts a song or sets up vocal tracks from a single prompt
Pixelmator Pro: Generate Fill, which edits a selected area from a text description
Final Cut Pro and Motion: image generation from text inside a project
Keynote, Pages and Numbers: an assistant in beta, plus MCP support so outside AI agents can read and edit documents

The update is free for subscribers in November. Creator Studio costs $12.99 a month or $129 a year in the US. Macworld called Apple's earlier Creator Studio AI tools "somewhat lackluster" next to Gemini in Google Workspace.

MCP support stands out in that list. It lets agents from other companies work inside Apple's office apps, which Apple has not opened this way before.

What the week says about the Mac

Apple did not replace the keyboard-first Mac. It added touch as a premium layer on top of it. Touch is limited to the most expensive MacBook Pro, at $2,899 and up, while the M6 models keep their prices at $1,499 and $1,999.

That split answers the old objection without fully dropping it. A buyer who agrees with Jobs can still get a non-touch Mac. A buyer who wants touch pays about $700 more, OLED panel included.

Whether touch spreads further depends on the apps. The real test comes when the touch updates from Microsoft, Adobe and Blender land later this year.