The first reviews of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with PROLED XDR displays landed Thursday, a day before launch, and reviewers mostly agree. The Verge's David Pierce said touch has not "meaningfully changed the laptop experience" — but recommends the machines anyway, for the OLED display. Gizmodo's Kyle Barr put it more bluntly: "The touchscreen is occasionally useful. It's not the end-all-be-all. But it sure is handy."

The useful moments are real but narrow. Pierce reaches out to pinch-zoom a photo, taps a video instead of hunting for the cursor, and swipes through options while showing someone his screen. Barr found touch improves iPhone Mirroring — you swipe up from the bottom of the mirrored phone like the real thing. WIRED's Luke Larsen mostly forgot the touchscreen existed during deep work, then caught himself swiping away a notification.

What's missing is more telling: no onscreen keyboard when you tap a text field, no copy/paste pop-up, and no Apple Pencil support at all — a strange omission on a laptop whose pitch is direct input.

The display is the part reviewers can't stop praising: the dual-layer tandem OLED panel hits up to 2,000 nits for HDR, with per-pixel blacks the mini-LED models can't match. Bloomberg's Chris Welch called it "genuinely striking," with no uniformity issues on his 16-inch unit. Mashable's Timothy Beck Werth went further: the PROLED display "absolutely slaps."

Everything else is refinement. The notch is gone, replaced by a Dynamic Island that now hosts Spotlight, Siri AI, Now Playing, and Live Activities from a paired iPhone. The machines are lighter and thinner, there's a 16TB storage option — and the glowing Apple logo is back on the lid. The one sour note: Apple claims the redesigned speakers deliver 50% deeper bass, and Welch found the extra low end can be "detrimental" — music and podcasts sound too boomy, with no way to dial it back.

Performance is unchanged — the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips as the mini-LED models. So the math is simple: from $2,899 (14-inch) and $3,399 (16-inch), the extra money buys a better screen and a lighter machine, with touch as a bonus. Apple's long touch holdout is over, and the first reviews suggest the company was right to wait — not because touch transforms the Mac, but because the display is good enough to carry the machine on its own.

— via MacRumors