Everything you need to know about the new MacBook Pro’s OLED display
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Summary
Apple’s recently introduced MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR introduces a tandem OLED display and, for the first time, a touch interface. I discussed the approach Apple took to designing its new pro laptop with Apple’s Vice President of Mac and iPad Product Marketing, Tom Boger, which you can read here . What follows is a little more information on some of the product features people are asking about, along with my first impressions of interacting with the display. How the panel is made The PROLED XDR display is made of 50 layers that total less than one millimeter. It’s a single sheet of glass carrying more than 100 million thin film transistors, arranged in 15 layers under 10 microns thick. The tandem OLED layers sit on top of this: two stacks making up 30 layers, each between a few nanometers and a few hundred nanometers thick. Apple wanted to make the display as thin as possible, because a thin display delivers much better performance and the company wanted to optimize the OLED technology. Apple took great pains in building this; it even worked with its display supplier to simulate how OLED molecules evaporate onto the glass and to track each layer’s thickness as it comes off the line. It was interesting to learn that the panels are made on giant sheets of “mother glass,” with about eighty 14-inch panels per sheet. The final layers add mechanical, electrical and thermal benefits, with optical adhesive and a cover glass with anti-reflective and fingerprint-resistant coatings placed on top. One industry observer I spoke with remarked that these high-end display fabrication factories are massive, the size of football stadiums, with the most extreme needs for clean-room suits and high-tech protection. What this means for the display The up to 2,000 nits display delivers stunning clarity with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It supports P3, Adobe RGB, DICOM and more, and shows colors at reference quality, something once reserved for monitors costing around $30,000. (Anyone who ever used an Apple Pro Display XDR will know how transformative that product was on introduction). The display engine in the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips used in the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR is very powerful. It controls the color and luminance of every pixel in real time, which is why it can deliver precise color accuracy. To achieve this, it adjusts each pixel at sub-millisecond speed, and refresh rates run adaptively from 10Hz to 120Hz. It even monitors and adapts to how each pixel is used, to prolong the panel’s life. If you opt for nanotexture glass, which many pros will do, that is literally etched into the cover glass. With or without nanotexture, the displays share the same fingerprint-resistant coating. How touch works on the display The touch sensors are built directly into the display layer rather than being added as a separate layer. This shows in the zero latency you experience when you touch something on-screen. Touch makes laptop lids wobble, so Apple redesigned the hinge to reduce that wobble. I found out there’s even a word for such a wobble: the time a screen takes to settle after being touched is called “ring down.” Anecdotally, at least, I gave the display several strong pokes, and it stopped moving very swiftly. Of course, when you make a video call you don’t want to look like you are moving once you poke the display, which is why the company developed an AI to deliver video stabilization to take the shake away. Compared to other leading touch-enabled laptops with OLED displays, Apple’s seems to deliver higher peak brightness, better shadow and highlight detail, less color shift at off-angles, and a more stable screen when touched. What about the operating system? Apple has done the work, so developers don’t have to. That’s why macOS converts touch into clicks automatically. That’s also why system menus automatically expand when touched so small controls are easier to tap. This stuff is built into the OS, so developers don’t have to do too much to support touch on a Mac. Some developers will need to, but for most apps, most of the time, touch is as simple as the trackpad. New gesture APIs on macOS support deeper optimization, but you won’t need to spend money on touch-enabled versions of Mac apps. Pinch-to-zoom and panning work when you touch the display, but you don’t have to do so, as the keyboard and trackpad continue to work just like they always have For accessibility, you’ll find full-screen zoom, stylus support (though not Apple Pencil), and the option to turn touch off entirely. What is it like with pro apps? I didn’t get too long with the Mac, but I can confirm a few features for some apps: You can grab and rotate objects in Pixelmator Pro. Logic Pro has an on-screen keyboard and step sequencer. And if you use Xcode, you can now test iOS and iPadOS apps on the Mac’s touchscreen. Of course, all those features rely on touch, but the processor inside these Macs is also extremely powerful. I’ve not tested this, but Apple has claimed that prompt processing for local language models (which matters for agentic coding workflows) is up to 12 times faster on the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips than on the M1 Pro and M1 Max. What it all means The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR may support touch, but to some extent this is less important than the power and performance it delivers, and its reference-grade, bright display. Color-critical creators stand to gain the most, but anyone who works with visuals will notice the difference. Pre-orders opened October 28 in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries from today, November 6. US prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch M5 Pro and rise to $4,799 for the 16-inch M5 Max. I don’t have one, which makes me sad — though hop over here for a short tour of the first product reviews . Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core , or follow me on BlueSky , LinkedIn , or Mastodon .
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