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Posted by etothet 7 hours ago

MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch(www.apple.com)
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/apple-unveils-groundb...
474 points | 815 commentspage 4
joshuat 7 hours ago|
I wish I could buy this without touch just for the rush of nostalgia, having the illuminated Apple logo on the back
imwally 7 hours ago|
One MacBook Air with a glowing Apple logo on the lid, please!
asciimov 4 hours ago||
For those wondering about the use case for touch screen, anytime you are showing info to someone and need to scroll the screen it’s much easier with a touch screen. I’ve encountered it most at doctors offices. Also scrolling through pictures with a client, or going through excel sheets with payroll is just easier using touch while sharing.

And let’s be honest, I bet those of us that use touch screens often enough have instinctively touched their laptops screen trying to scroll it on more than a few occasions, I know I’m guilty of it.

mattrighetti 7 hours ago||
Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?

EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.

dcss_gardener 7 hours ago||
You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.
Bud 6 hours ago||
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jeroenhd 7 hours ago|||
Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.

Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.

akamaka 7 hours ago|||
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
gizajob 7 hours ago||||
I’ve felt for years that they were holding out until they could make a dual touchscreen MacBook work and be a peak experience. I was expecting an iPhone duo type MacBook. That hasn’t happened.

Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.

jeroenhd 6 hours ago||
Some of their examples are absolutely ridiculous, for sure. The lack of a fold-back design, like the surface, with pencil support is also a surprise to me. I suppose they'd still rather sell you an iPad with an operating system they don't let you control rather than bringing their laptop segment up to par with the competition.

But having had to emulate pinch-zoom in an Android emulator has made me wish I had my touch screen laptop back. Emulated touch events also don't work like real touch events, so web dev can also be a bit annoying sometimes.

lucasoshiro 7 hours ago|||
My company once gave me a touchscreen laptop and I did know that until I touched the screen by accident. It was fun to play but I never found it useful. I heard many people saying the same, some of them even preferred to disable. I find it uncomfortable to touch a laptop screen... The only thing seems to benefit from that for me is photo editing apps or 3D modelling.

So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?

jeroenhd 6 hours ago||
It's just small things. I don't have a touch screen laptop anymore, but being able to physically tap things or reaching over to touch things just felt natural.

I have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a trackpad, yet I rarely use mouse mode on it. Seeing kids interact with laptops for the first time and touching the screen expecting them to work like every other device they use is also probably a sign of the times.

I understand why not everyone likes them, though. Some people prefer to disable their trackpads too, or prefer ball mice, or prefer mouse gestures over keyboard gestures. To each their own. I welcome the diversity.

linguae 7 hours ago|||
I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.

If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.

xutopia 7 hours ago|||
I remember Steve Jobs saying something about how silly it would be.
nomilk 7 hours ago||
He said the same of the stylus during the iPhone launch, but it eventually came to life (just in a much more specific setting/use case)
asdff 6 hours ago|||
The pencil is bad enough but how it charges itself is even worse. Lets turn my ipad into a brittle stingray. It's up there with the mouse having to charge upside down for apples top own goals.
K7PJP 6 hours ago|||
He said if the device required a stylus, they failed. The pencil is useful for certain applications, but not required.
jgrahamc 7 hours ago|||
I use Mac mostly, but I also use a Panasonic Toughbook (https://blog.jgc.org/2025/07/ode-to-anti-mac-panasonic-tough...) and it has a touch screen display and I find it's a useful addition to how I interact with it.
mcv 7 hours ago|||
I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.

Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.

dsego 7 hours ago|||
Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.
TuxSH 7 hours ago|||
You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.
mattrighetti 7 hours ago||
> the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag

How so? I have an M2, carry it in a bag daily but my screen is still pristine

TuxSH 4 hours ago||
Not sure when it started (at least the M4 is affected by this) but all the macbooks I had (personal+work) since the M4 have display dimples after being put in a stuffed backpack.

Meanwhile the M1 Air I had for more than 3 years never saw the issue.

karpovv-boris 7 hours ago|||
especially with the same lid angle. Look at the pictures, they didn't even know how people use touchscreen on the laptops, it's funny
randerson 7 hours ago|||
If you've ever watched a kid try to use a MacBook, they instinctively touch the screen because they were raised on iPads.
1e1a 7 hours ago|||
I need a screen which zaps me whenever I touch it, to discouraged me from accidentally leaving fingerprints at the edge.
SirMaster 7 hours ago|||
Even when developing a mobile app and using the simulator, you never wished you could touchscreen the simulator?
sroussey 7 hours ago|||
Yes, I agree, but I caught myself touching the screen twice this week forgetting it was a Mac...
causal 7 hours ago|||
1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.

2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.

whalesalad 7 hours ago|||
when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.
egypturnash 7 hours ago||
Nope. Never had any desire for one.
mentalgear 6 hours ago||
Steve Jobs on Macbook w/ Touch:

> “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,”

> “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”

“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.

After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.

Grombobulous 4 hours ago|
Be careful with quotes like this. Steve Jobs was a salesperson. He has had a good history of selling compromises as intent.

Remember when he was trying to tell us that the original iPhone having no App Store was intentional, we don’t need it, because we have the best web browser? Yeah, that was just a plain lie because the App Store wasn’t ready.

Or the time he got on stage and acted like the Rokr was a good phone (although you could see through that one a little better).

Udo_Schmitz 2 hours ago||
https://youtu.be/OdlEZWSq0zM?t=3383
semireg 1 hour ago||
Well, at least my children can now instinctively touch the screen and it’ll do something, instead of dad saying “stop, it’s not an iPad.”
mastercheif 6 hours ago||
OLED screens often exhibit poor text rendering.

I'm curious to see this in person. Looks like the "PROLED" is not using an RGB stripe layout.

Pixel density can reduce text fringing, but I have not seen a laptop OLED panel that renders text as well as an LCD yet.

AlanYx 6 hours ago||
It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.
layer8 5 hours ago||
This looks the same as the iPad Pro tandem OLED pixel layout. That I happen to write this comment on.
AlanYx 5 hours ago||
Doesn't the iPad Pro tandem OLED look like this? https://www.ltec-biz.com/en/report/post-3026/

The layout shown in that document is quite different.

techpression 4 hours ago||
Too bad they didn't go for the fifth generation panels with RGB layout. I have one of those monitors and it's so good, text is extremely crisp and of course zero fringing. On retina it won't be as annoying as on a normal monitor obviously.
mvkel 4 hours ago||
Similar to the "hole drilled through the kitchen table" problem of the HomeView ad, seeing the hands/arms floating in to touch the screen immediately makes me imagine the impossible ergonomics of reaching across a keyboard to touch a screen.

Steve would agree: "We've done tons of user tests on this, and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn't work. It's ergonomically terrible."

It's like having a remote control to read your kindle that's sitting on a stand 2 feet away (which, coincidentally, Amazon just announced).

Apparently the Ternus era of Apple is focusing on whether something can be built, not whether it should be released.

georgel 7 hours ago||
Glowing logo is back!
pat2man 7 hours ago||
worth the $3k right here
LoganDark 7 hours ago||
Oh my god yes!!
at1as 6 hours ago|
Sure, we wanted OLED (my ROG G14 has a wonderful screen compared to my mac).

But touch will go about as well as the touchbar did

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