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The touchscreen has pretty much dominated the entire conversation around the new OLED MacBook Pros. And when I first demoed this thing last week at the LA event, I thought like, you know, it's neat. It's cool that they're doing this, but I felt like it's not for me. And I just thought it was like a small bonus feature to the product. But the reactions people had to this, it ranged from mild curiosity all the way to people being genuinely upset that touchscreen would even exist on a MacBook Pro. So, I've had this for a little bit and my perspective on it has changed. My biggest fear right out of the gate was that Apple would lean into this touchscreen stuff way too heavily.
Like the way that Microsoft did with Windows 8 and somehow ruined the operating system, but it didn't. The integration is very subtle. For one, you can disable it completely and you won't even know that touch exists. But secondly, Mac OS for the most part feels unchanged. like there are some touchscreen gestures baked in now, but it still for the most part feels like a very mouse or touchpad oriented operating system and there's no support for Apple Pencil or pressure sensitivity. It's just for your fingers. Now, the places where I find it naturally useful are like when you're browsing a site and you just kind of want to scroll through casually with your finger. That is something that I
think a lot of people do on any kind of touch enabled device and it doesn't involve any kind of like poking. It's just like a casual sliding around kind of like you're working on a phone. Uh, but also with photo editing or like 2D illustration with like the pinch and zoom as well as 3D work, moving some objects around, it feels natural to me because I'm moving the canvas around with my finger. But where it feels unnatural to me and just I feel like the way that most people would find it unpleasant to use is when you're poking at the screen at UI elements. So, most UI elements are way too small to poke at with any kind of accuracy, but Apple does have tools for developers to allow those UI elements to get bigger with
like a magnification, and it allows you to interact with those things easier. So, you see it on the traffic light things like the red, yellow, green buttons, but you got to tap it a couple times, once to bring up the magnified version, and then a second time to actually hit the thing you're trying to hit. You can't just double tap blindly. Like you have to tap it once and then realign your finger because the magnified version has a different location for where that thing was and then you got to hit it. [clears throat] There's like strategy to it. Right now you got to lead your shot. But what is this like a competitor shooter? You like jiggle peak your close button? This is crazy. And I think most people looking
at these samples are like it is conceptually very cool. The idea of a button that changes its form based on how you're interacting with it is neat and the animation is nice, but I think most people wouldn't want to interact with a computer like this. Now, the good thing, and this is super important, Apple's not forcing this on the user. Like I said, you can disable it completely. And the existence or the presence of that touch capability did not make this device thicker. It did not make it heavier. It just exists for the people that do want to use it. There are going to be circumstances like browsing around and like the photo editing I was talking about. There are going to be
circumstances where it is objectively speaking more convenient to use your finger. It might be rare but it does exist and now you have that capability. The one thing I would knock Apple for though is their marketing. Because on their website and their commercial and at the event, they were showcasing people using the touchscreen in just what I thought was very unrealistic ways. Cuz I don't think that music producers would actually want to poke at the screen. I don't think like video colorists would want to poke at the screen. You just don't have the precision that a mouse or touchpad would. And as a video editor, I'm pretty sure that most video editors would not
want to poke at their screen. And all of this made me think like why like this is it seems unlike Apple to depict a creative tool like this being used in a unrealistic manner. I mean you can knock Apple for what they want. They have like crazy marketing but this felt off-brand to me. But then I got you know I got this thing in and I was thinking about it and then something dawned in my mind that I think a lot of viewers also struggle with this like this to be open-minded like this. So yes, all those things look unrealistic to us because this is the world we live in right now. But at the same time, there are millions of people who literally edit with touchscreens and who create music with touchcreens. Like the
people that have, you know, used phones and tablets to do all those things. Like think about Cap Cut and the built-in editor on Instagram. Literal millions of people use those apps with a touchcreen and they edit stuff. And it is conceivable that as they progress further down the career when they get a laptop that they would want to continue using the input that they're used to, right? These people that grew up using Cap Cut on a screen, they would potentially want to use the touchcreen still to interact with their creative work. And it is presumptuous of us and almost like judgmental of us to be like, "Hey, no one uses it like this." When it's possible that they would. I'm just
saying to be open-minded about this. So, when I look at this product from my perspective, I wouldn't use the touchcreen very much. And I fully agree when Steve Jobs said back in like 2010 or something that vertical touchcreens are ergonomically terrible. I'm right there. However, times have changed. The fingerprint situation, this does get fingerprints. It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The thing is, you have stuff on your screen anyways. Like, if you're on a laptop right now, put it in the light. There's probably stuff all over it. You just got to wipe it down once in a while. It's just the nature of any kind of touch surface. The hinge, uh, they did make it stiffer, so it's like harder to open.
Uh, it's still one hand openable, but it's like a little bit stiffer, but it still wobbles when you poke at it. That's just poking at things make things wobble. That's partially why I don't love the UI poking. But in terms of like sliding things around with your finger, this is less bouncy on the screen. Now, touchscreen aside, the rest of the laptop or where the upgrades are, the previous generation of MacBook Pro was already such a good product that it was actually very difficult to make it better. If you think about all the reviews and all the kind of commentary around that previous generation, it was just a handful of complaints. Number one, the notch was kind of gnarly. Uh
two, the weight a little bit heavier and the mini LED screen wasn't the best. This new OLED MacBook Pro addresses almost all of it. So, let's start with the screen. It is amazing. This is truly an excellent screen. I don't love the name like Prolled doesn't sound particularly on brand for Apple, but visually so nice. It's a tandem OLED, so there's two OLED layers stacked on top of each other. And you can run them both for higher brightness instead of overdriving a single layer. And this display gets very bright with incredibly high contrast. And the viewing angles are also really good. You can go off-axis like 90° and it still has good brightness and contrast. And also no more blooming. It's an issue that the
mini LED devices had. I don't think it was something that most people would have noticed. like you need a very particular scene with like full blackness and a white object and the backlight would spill over to make that bloom. That's gone because it's an OLED panel and these are pixels that turn on and off individually so you can't bloom. Like there's no backlighting to create any of that artifacting. Uh but my favorite thing about this OLED screen is the response time. So the previous one had a high refresh rate but because it was LCD there was ghosting. This because it's OLED has pixel turning on and off super fast, very quick response time.
It's obviously not a gaming laptop. It's not a gaming screen, but god damn, it is a fast screen. Uh there's also native hardware genlock support for people that work in video production. And also there's supposedly real time compensation at a per pixel level to like make sure that the brightness and the color and the kind of like duration or like the lifespan of each pixel is optimized so they can just last very long. uh seems like a really good screen and just visually this is so much nicer at least for the stuff that I do like video editing and playing games on it. You can really notice a difference with an OLED panel. But for a lot of people it may not be that visually
stunning. Uh I don't want to like oversell it from that perspective, but everyone's expectations and needs on a screen is very different. But I think it's a really nice screen. Uh a few other like features. The dynamic island. This is kind of neat. I never found the notch all that bothersome. I know some people really hated it. But this now allows you so that you know the OSD now shows up over here instead of on the side because you can use that dynamic island as an element for that uh like any of the OSD that pops up. Uh also it's got thinner bezels if you care and a rounded bottom corner if you care. Now that those things really matter to me, but for some people they do. Okay, the
weight reduction on this device is very significant. That was another one of the big complaints of the previous generation. My M2 MacBook Pro, I purposely got a 14-inch back then because I just found the 16-inch too heavy. This is I mean it's still uh this is still heavier than the 14-in, but it's a lot closer. I'm going to go with a 6-in device if I upgrade this year. It is quite impressive that they got it to this weight. Now, in terms of thickness on Apple's website, the new MacBook Pros with the OLED screens are fractionally thinner than the previous generation, but those measurements that you see on the website do not include the feet. But because the new feet are sunken into the case a little bit, the perceived height
is even less than you might expect. Now, in terms of performance, this, despite that weight reduction, still has amazing performance, identical performance from what I can tell to the thicker device. Now, in the previous generation of MacBook Pro, there was a performance difference between the 14-inch product and the 16-inch product. It wasn't like a massive one, but if you had a sustained heavy workload after like 10 15 minutes, you would be able to spot the difference between the two. on this device. This is only a 16 inch. I've only been able to test a 16 inch. I imagine that a delta like that exists as well. Uh but it's physics, right?
Smaller device, smaller fans. It's going to have less thermal capability. The thermal solution on the new MacBook Pro is different. They've changed the air flow. The old MacBook Pros had an air intake in the middle of like the bottom section of the screen, and there were two side vents that would exhaust out towards the screen. The new one drops those side exhaust and all the hot air goes out at the bottom of the back so that the OLED panel doesn't get hit with any of that exhaust. And the thermals when this thing is closed looks very good as well. I couldn't see any difference in performance. Battery life seemed very similar to the previous generation and it's still clearly a very
energyefficient platform. The speakers sound better, which is surprising because it's been like 5 years of Apple's speakers just dominating this space. They are still force cancelling so you don't feel the vibrations when your hands are on the palm rest. Now, the Apple logo, this lights up when your screen is on. The first five ticks of brightness have the same kind of logo brightness, but once you go to like the sixth to the 16th point of brightness, it gets increasingly brighter. All right, the pricing. This is very expensive. Uh, it is an Apple product. This is like $400 more than the previous MacBook Pros with the mini LED screens.
I wish that there was like a non-touch version. Even if it was like 50 bucks off, I would choose that over the touchcreen. But yeah, uh it is a $400 upgrade for whatever it is that you're interested on this new generation. See, the previous one, I think Apple knows that it was a really good product and it was a very difficult laptop to improve. So, they did this. Touch is like the least important thing of it. But yeah, uh there it is. The new OLED MacBook Pro. Super expensive, but it's a good one.
