Apple's First Touchscreen MacBook Pro Costs $2,899 — $400 More Than the Non-Touch Version, With a Dynamic Island Borrowed From the iPhone

The first Mac you can draw and scroll directly on the screen ships November 6, at a real premium over the non-touch MacBook Pro Apple announced the same week.

Apple announced its first touchscreen Mac ever on October 28, 2026: a redesigned MacBook Pro with a tandem-OLED PROLED XDR display that responds to touch, a capability no MacBook has had in the line's entire history. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, both running Apple's M5 Pro chip at the base configuration; stepping up to M5 Max pushes pricing to $4,499 and $4,799. Preorders are open now, with units shipping and arriving in stores November 6.

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MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display specs →YouTube ↗

What touch actually does

Apple built specific use cases around the touchscreen rather than just adding basic tap-to-click support: drawing and sketching directly on the display, pinch-to-zoom on photos and PDFs, swiping through presentation slides without reaching for the trackpad, and playing software instruments on-screen in apps like Logic Pro. That's a narrower pitch than turning the Mac into a tablet — it's aimed squarely at creative workflows where touching the screen genuinely saves a step, not at replacing the trackpad and keyboard for everyday use.

The price of touch

TechCrunch reports the touch models carry a flat $400 premium over the equivalent non-touch M5 configuration — meaning the touchscreen itself, not the chip or memory, accounts for that gap. Fully configuring either size pushes the price much higher: a maxed-out 14-inch model reaches $14,249, and the 16-inch tops out at $14,549, according to Apple's own online configurator.

Dynamic Island comes to macOS

Borrowed from the iPhone, Dynamic Island on the new MacBook Pro houses the laptop's Center Stage webcam and expands to surface live information — Apple's own press materials show it displaying an Apple Music now-playing card with playback controls without opening the Music app. It's the first time the iPhone-originated interface element has appeared on a Mac.

Display specs behind the price

The tandem-OLED panel reaches up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and SDR content, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and a 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate that scales down to 10Hz to save power. Apple says the new anti-reflective coating is aimed at the glare that has historically made touchscreens harder to use outdoors or under bright office lighting — a real, practical concern for a touch display specifically, separate from the brightness and contrast numbers.

Don't confuse it with the other new MacBook Pro

The touchscreen model isn't the only MacBook Pro Apple updated this week. A separate, non-touch 14-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's new M6 chip also launched, starting at $1,999 — nearly $900 cheaper than the base touchscreen model, with no OLED panel and no Dynamic Island. The new M6 iMac, which went on sale the same week starting at $1,499, doesn't have touch either. If a touchscreen is specifically what you're after, it's the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display you need — the plain "MacBook Pro" and iMac refreshes keep the standard non-touch screens Apple has always used.

Apple resisted touch on the Mac for well over a decade while putting it on every iPhone and iPad it sold; this is the company's first real move in the other direction, and it's arriving as a premium option rather than a standard upgrade. At $400 more than an already expensive configuration, and with a first-generation feature set focused narrowly on drawing, scrolling and media control, it reads as a laptop for people who already know they want to touch their screen — not a sign that every future MacBook Pro will work this way.

Original coverage: Apple launches its first touchscreen MacBook Pro at $2,899