Apple has just announced its first-ever touchscreen Mac, the new MacBook Pro, 16 years after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs declared touchscreen laptops as "ergonomically terrible" and 42 years after the first Macintosh was released.

It was at an October 2010 keynote where Jobs unveiled a new MacBook Air, and explained his reasoning why touch screens don't belong on a laptop, saying that they had completed "tons of user testing and it turns out it doesn't work". Fast forward to 2026, Apple has since had two more CEOs, with Tim Cook upholding this stance on the Mac during his 15-year tenure. He stepped down less than a couple of months ago, and current CEO John Ternus is taking the leap.

Of course, the product would have been in development under Cook, but Ternus had been head of hardware engineering at Apple since 2021, so he would have surely influenced the decision.

The Touchscreen MacBook Pro

The first-ever touchscreen Mac has a Multi-Touch OLED display panel, a thinner and lighter chassis, thinner bezels and has swapped the notch out for the Dynamic Island. It's the first major visual redesign to the MacBook Pro in 5 years.

At a Glance

  • Touchscreen
  • Glowing Apple logo
  • OLED display
  • 120Hz ProMotion
  • Thinner & lighter
  • Thinner display bezels
  • Dynamic Island
  • M5 Pro & M5 Max chips
  • 16TB storage option

Base Model

The new MacBook Pro starts with an M5 Pro chip that has a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU. It has 24GB of memory and a 1TB SSD.

Upgrades

The M5 Pro chip can be upgraded to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU.

This device can also be upgraded with an M5 Max chip that has an 18-core CPU and either 32 or 40 GPU cores.

Customers have the choice of upgrading the memory to 48GB with the M5 Pro chip, or 48GB, 64GB and 128GB with the M5 Max. The M5 Max configuration starts from 36GB.

Storage can be upgraded from 1TB to 2TB, 4TB, 8TB or 16TB.

Pricing & Availability

The touchscreen MacBook Pro is available to pre-order today.

This MacBook Pro starts from £2,899 up from the previous £2,499. It will be available to customers from next week on Friday, 6th November.

Other pre-orders opening today

Pre-orders for the new iPad mini (A20 Pro), iMac (M6) and MacBook Pro (M6) are also now open.

The Mac Studio M5 Ultra model can also now be configured with up to 512GB of memory for £22,299.00.