The 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $2,899. That’s the highest launch price Apple has ever put on a MacBook Pro, and it even tops the 17-inch model from 2006, which started at $2,799. BGR pointed out that comparison in its launch coverage, and the numbers check out.
Apple showed the new machine on October 28 at an event in Los Angeles called “Pro and Tell”. Pre-orders opened the same day and the laptops reach stores on November 6. The official name is MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, which nobody will type twice, so from here I’m calling it the OLED MacBook Pro.
The sticker price isn’t the interesting part for me, the history behind it is. Before June, a 14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro started at $2,199. Apple raised prices across most of its lineup that month because memory and storage costs went up, and the same laptop now starts at $2,499. The OLED model adds $400 on top of that. So the $700 gap is really two separate things, a $300 parts-cost increase that every buyer pays and a $400 charge for the new screen and body.
The body is lighter, and that’s the first thing you’d notice picking one up. The 14-inch drops half a pound to 3 pounds. The 16-inch comes in at 4 pounds. Apple also trimmed the thickness, by half a millimeter on the 14-inch and nearly a full millimeter on the 16-inch, and thinner bezels give screens that measure 14.2 and 16.3 inches. None of this changes the overall shape. It still looks like a MacBook Pro, which BGR points out too.
The notch is gone. In its place is a pill-shaped camera cutout that Apple has turned into a Dynamic Island, same idea as on the iPhone. Spotlight and Siri now show up there, plus Live Activities, according to BGR’s summary of the announcement.
The glowing Apple logo on the lid is back.
And the hinge is where Apple spent its effort, for an obvious reason. On most touchscreen laptops the display rocks backward every time you tap it, and Apple says its new hinge holds the screen steady while a finger pokes at it. Apple also routed hot air through hinge, which freed up space inside and helped cut weight. There’s even video stabilization that smooths your camera feed if you touch the screen during a call. I mean, that one detail tells you how much a tapped screen shakes.
The screen, and the touch question
The panel itself is the real change. It’s a tandem OLED, built on the same idea as the iPad Pro’s screen, and it replaces the mini-LED display Apple has used in MacBook Pros since 2021. Apple quotes up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and a refresh rate that moves between 10Hz and 120Hz. It covers P3 and Adobe RGB. CGM Mag listed the earlier M5 Pro model’s peak HDR brightness at 1,600 nits, so the jump in brightness is real but not huge on paper.
Contrast is where you’d see the difference. Mini-LED screens can glow around a bright object on a dark background because each backlight zone is bigger than a pixel, and OLED lights every pixel on its own. Engadget notes Apple also says the tandem design keeps brightness and grayscale even across the whole screen. The nano-texture option, the matte finish for bright rooms, is now etched directly into the cover glass.
Touch works across the full display on both sizes. The sensor sits inside the panel instead of on top of it, which Apple says reduces latency. macOS 27 has been reworked for fingers, and existing apps need no changes because the system turns a tap into a click.
Apple spent years saying it had no interest in a touchscreen Mac, even though it had built working prototypes. BGR reports that Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, pushed this project, and that his view was Apple had fallen behind because buyers now expect touch on a laptop. Which, fair enough, is a reasonable argument. Windows laptops have had touchscreens for more than a decade. Touch barely registers in the laptop rankings Consumer Reports puts together, though, and I found that a funny detail given how long Apple took.
I haven’t touched one. Nobody outside Apple has used it for more than a demo yet, so I can’t tell you if the macOS 27 changes feel natural or tacked on, and that’s the biggest unknown in this launch. My lean, and it’s just a lean, is that most owners will look at this screen all day and touch it now and then.
Same chips, same ports
Inside, nothing is new. The OLED MacBook Pro uses the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips Apple released in March, so anyone who already owns one of those laptops gets no extra speed from upgrading, as BGR spells out. Expert Reviews describes the M5 Pro as an 18-core CPU with six of the new super cores and twelve performance cores. The M5 Max goes up to a 40-core GPU. Memory can be configured up to 128GB and storage up to 16TB.
The ports haven’t moved either. You get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe and a headphone jack. M5 Pro models drive up to three external displays and M5 Max models up to four. Apple rates battery life at up to 24 hours and says a 30-minute fast charge gets to 50 percent, per Engadget’s rundown. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 are in there. The six-speaker system has a new woofer design that Apple says gives 50 percent deeper bass, which I mention only because nobody will buy this laptop for the woofer.
The lineup is where it gets silly. A day earlier, Apple launched a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the new M6 chip for $1,999, with 16GB of memory and a 1TB drive, in the old body with the mini-LED display. The M6 has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. So Apple’s newest chip is in its cheapest MacBook Pro, and the older M5 Pro and M5 Max sit in the expensive ones. I read that chip list twice to be sure I had it the right way round. The Pro and Max chips have far more cores and much higher memory bandwidth than the M6, which BGR says is why the older chips are still faster for video exports and 3D renders.
The thing I’d watch most is heat. Notebookcheck tested the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Max in March and reported serious thermal throttling, plus CPU performance that jumped around from run to run. It said the chassis and cooling couldn’t handle that chip properly. The 16-inch did better. Digital Trends measured about 18 percent higher multi-core scores on the 16-inch, with its CPU cores drawing 78 watts, which the smaller body couldn’t sustain. Notebookcheck also found the 16-inch M5 Max stayed consistent on battery, something it said many Windows laptops don’t manage. Now, all of that was measured on the old body. Apple says the new hinge cooling keeps performance the same as before, and I’d read “the same as before” carefully, because it could include the throttling. I’m oversimplifying a bit, since Notebookcheck’s trouble showed up on the top-end M5 Max and not on the M5 Pro. So nobody knows yet whether the 14-inch OLED model with an M5 Max behaves any better, and Apple hasn’t said. Reviews after November 6 will answer it.
One more limit hasn’t changed. Notebookcheck says only the fans and battery can be serviced on these laptops, because everything else is soldered. The 24GB or 128GB you pick on day one is what you live with.
What it costs
Here are the launch prices in full. The 14-inch starts at $2,899 with an M5 Pro, 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage. The 16-inch with the same specs starts at $3,399. Move up to the M5 Max and the 14-inch is $4,499 while the 16-inch is$4,799. I haven’t seen Apple’s pricing for the 128GB and 16TB options, so I won’t guess, but it’ll be a lot.
Apple is keeping the regular M5 Pro and M5 Max models on sale too, at $2,499 for the 14-inch and $2,999 for the 16-inch. Those have the old body and the mini-LED screen, with the same chips inside. The M6 14-inch at $1,999 sits well below all of them.
So who should pre-order? If you’re coming from an Intel MacBook Pro or an M1, any of these is several years of upgrades at once, and the OLED model is just the most expensive way to get them. If you already have an M5 Pro or M5 Max, you’d be paying at least $700 for a screen and a lighter body, with no change in speed. My lean is against pre-ordering. Touch on macOS 27 hasn’t been tested beyond a demo, the 14-inch Max heat question is still open, and Apple’s order page won’t answer either one.
Wait for the first full reviews after November 6. The result I’ll look for first is what Notebookcheck finds when it runs the M5 Max in the new 14-inch body.