Apple’s first MacBook Pro you can touch was already on tables in Los Angeles today, and media and creators got their hand on it before anyone else.
The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR is the first Mac with a touchscreen, and early hands-on video from the Pro and Tell event shows how that feels in real use.
In Canada the 14-inch model starts at $3,999 CAD and the 16-inch at $4,799 CAD, with pre-orders open now and arrivals on Friday, November 6. Apple’s release puts peak brightness at 2000 nits for HDR and SDR, with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Both hands-on clips keep coming back to how bright and vivid that tandem OLED looks up close.
Brian Tong filmed a first look on his channel with a silver 14-inch unit. He said the display pops off the glass, with colours that look vivid even under event lighting, and that the laptop feels light at about three pounds. MagSafe 3, Thunderbolt 5 ports on both sides, HDMI, an SDXC card slot and a 3.5 mm headphone jack are all still there, so the port layout did not get stripped for the new panel.
Touch is the bigger change. In his hands-on, Tong pinched and zoomed photos with multi-touch, double-tapped to open images from his library, and used a three-finger swipe to move between apps. He also dragged a window from the top bar into a split-screen layout, tapped through Keynote slides, painted gold onto a 3D surface with a brush tool, and scrubbed a Final Cut Pro playhead with his finger. His take was that you will not touch everything on a Mac, but you now have the option when a gesture is faster than the trackpad.
Booredatwork was on the floor with a 16-inch model and leaned into the same point. In that hands-on, the creator called the touchscreen smooth, snapped windows around, and zoomed through maps and an editing timeline with taps and swipes. The unit felt light and comfortable to hold, with the 16-inch said to land around four pounds next to the roughly three-pound 14-inch. Ports remain plentiful on that chassis too.
Dynamic Island shows up on Mac for the first time here. Booredatwork tapped into it while media was playing and moved around Live Activity-style controls at the notch. The same clip also catches the lit Apple logo on a closed lid nearby, the detail John Ternus teased on X ahead of the event. Configurations still climb to 128GB of unified memory and 16TB of storage on both sizes.
Neither spent much time on keyboard feel or hinge resistance in these short clips. What both videos agree on is the screen. It looks bright and sharp on the show floor, and touch is responsive enough that reaching up feels natural in creative apps such as Final Cut Pro, maps and photo tools.
Expect more hands-on videos to hit YouTube later today as media channels upload their footage.
Canadians can pre-order the touch MacBook Pro now for a November 6 delivery.
Would you reach for the glass on a MacBook Pro, or stick with the trackpad?
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