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They did it. Today, Apple announced the MacBook Pro with Pro LED, their first touchscreen Mac. And the PC fanboy reaction probably goes a little something like this. Wow, way to go, Apple. You did it. You finally caught up. What magical innovations are you going to steal from my team of favorite billionaire oligarchs next? But I actually don't subscribe to that. I mean, yes, Apple often innovates by rebranding existing technologies. It is the first iPhone to do this. But they nearly always put on their own unique spin that, if we're being honest, is usually pretty thoughtful. Take the context menu, for example. Depending on
whether you click it with a mouse or touch it, it will open with tight spacing for better display density or with a bit more breathing room for your fat fingers. That might seem inconsequential to you, but then I bet you probably haven't tried to unpack a 7z file on an ROG Ally. It's these little touches, pun intended, that could give macOS with touch a leg up over Windows. As if Apple needed one. Their relentless improvements to Apple Silicon and their timeless hardware have led to enormous sales growth for MacBooks in recent years. And this new design looks like the best one yet. Thanks to their painfully named Pro LED XDR screen, we cut through the marketing, is a tandem OLED panel that hits a thousand nits sustained and up to
2,000 nits of peak brightness in both HDR and SDR. It features ProMotion variable refresh rate to go between 10 and 120 hertz, and it covers not only the DCI-P3 color space, but finally all of Adobe RGB and 80% of Rec. 2020. If you want to go deep on it, the company even published a white paper showing how good this thing is for serious content creation like film mastering. And like the Studio Display XDR, it can even be used for medical imaging with a DICOM reference mode built in. And of course, it's got a touch screen. All it'll cost you is a $2,900 US starting price, and that's for the 14-in model.
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that it was one of the most accurate displays like ever. So, I'm pretty excited to have that tech, but brighter and maybe even better in a laptop that is way more likely to be used for heavy color-critical work. Like the previous model, there's an anti-reflective coating should make it easier to use outside, but anyone who's really worried about glare is going to need to cough up an extra $150 for Apple's nano texture option, which has maybe been upgraded, but we're not going to be able to tell until we get our hands on one. Like a modern iPhone, the new MacBook has a dynamic island to house its webcam with advanced video stabilization now, though no Face ID still. And to make better use of the island, Apple is moving Spotlight search
onto it. Can't say I love that choice. Kind of wish I could vote it off, but hey, at least we're improving the consistency with the iPhone. The Dynamic Island also shows live activities like timers and now playing information. Though, it remains to be seen just how useful it's going to be on such a large display. Oh, and one more thing. They brought back the glowing Apple logo on the lid. That is a nice touch. That's two. Speaking of touch, one of the coolest things about this new display is the way that Apple integrated the touch sensors directly into the panel rather than layering them on top.
I have so many questions about how they did this and whether it will have an impact on the visibility of the touch interface, but those are going to have to wait for our hands-on with the device. That's three. The biggest question for me, though, is how well macOS is going to adapt to being touched. It's been getting more iPhone-like over the past few years with things like the liquid glass control center and other app layouts that feel like they were plucked straight from an iPad or an iPhone. But, seeing the early resistance to touchscreen Macs among the Apple faithful, I'm not sure how much that frog boiling is going to help with this move. I mean, I know that I like having a touchscreen. In my opinion,
it's just objectively better to have more options for computer interaction. And while Apple has stopped short of adding pencil support to the MacBook, I am pretty sure that things like trackpad gestures on the screen and stoplight magnification are going to help ease the transition for people. But, I've been wrong about what Apple people prefer before. Inside, the new MacBook Pro LED is using the M5 Pro and Max chips, which is a little disappointing now that the M6 exists. Though, there is supposedly better thermal management in the new model. I don't expect that to make much of a difference in most workloads compared to the same chip in an older MacBook Pro non-LED, but your mileage may vary, especially if you're doing like heavy AI stuff.
The similarities between the old and the new model don't end there, though. Battery life is rated for the same 22 to 24 hours, depending on your chip and chassis size. It still has Touch ID. The pixel density is basically the same. There are still three microphones, all the same IO, and the list goes on and on. Really, the major difference is the display, and to accommodate it, some redesigned internals. Though, both sizes do get deeper bass in the speakers. Both are roughly half a pound lighter, which is pretty cool, and they're a few millimeters thinner than the older non-OLED models. Here's the rest of the pricing, by the way.
It's high, especially for that 16 TB storage model. I mean, good gravy. But, considering the current RAM-pocalypse situation and the expected Apple tax, honestly, it doesn't seem that far out of range, and the old ones are still for sale if you don't need a Pro LED screen and you want to save a few bucks. Moving on, there's also a new iPad Mini, which is pretty exciting as far as new iPad Minis go. It has an OLED screen and an IP67 rating, which is pretty awesome for anyone who wants to take their iPad on the go, or more realistically, for anyone who wants to read in the tub. And inside the 14% thinner chassis is the A20 Pro chip that we absolutely loved in our iPhone 18 Pro review. With that said, you don't get
the same chip in every model of the new iPad Mini. The 128 and 256 gig models use a lower-binned chip with just five CPU cores instead of six. But, hey, at least they took away an efficiency core and not one of those beefy super cores. And if you buy the 512 gig SKU, then you do get the full chip. While we're going to have to wait for performance benchmarks later, I do have to wonder if this super thin body design without a vapor chamber, like the iPhone 18 Pro has, is going to result in the same performance thanks to its larger footprint. I would like to say I'm sure Apple knows what they're doing, but we've seen Apple devices thermal throttle before. Moving back around to the screen, Apple is calling this one an
acoustic display. Does that mean it doesn't pick up on social cues? No, it seems to mean that it has speakers under the glass that help keep the device fully sealed. But when you look closely at the tech specs page, there do appear to be small cutouts at the top and the bottom where the speakers could channel audio through. Um so, I'm imagining right now this is going to turn out to be quite similar to the earpiece speaker on a modern iPhone. The display appears to be a 60 Hz LTPS display with 600 nits of sustained brightness and 1200 nits peak. And it should also cover the P3 spectrum and due to it being an OLED, it'll have great contrast. Now, since the new iPad
Mini was actually announced on Monday, there's already a lot of chatter online and we've seen some threads of people claiming that Apple's actually using a panel and manually locking it to 60 Hz. One theory for why they might do that is to maintain the roughly 10 hours of battery life that Apple advertises for the Mini. I can see why they would do that, but 120 Hz really would have been pretty nice given that the year is now 2026, especially since they've ratcheted the Mini's price up twice this year. First by $100 in June due to RAMageddon and now by
another $100 with the redesign. Outside of that, Apple also added the M6 chip to their base model MacBook Pro and to the iMac and there's no other major hardware changes on those ones and the computers cost $2,000 and $1,500 respectively, retaining the bumped-up prices from Apple's response to the RAM crisis in June. Now, I guess the only crisis that I need to solve is how am I going to tell you about our sponsor? ThreatLocker. With zero-trust AI control, you can have full oversight over what your agents can access while your environment. Approving agents and AI tools should not mean approving vulnerabilities and increasing your attack surface. Zero Trust AI Control or
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protection. Plus, the dashboard provides recommendations for security policies to strengthen your control over AI. Learn more about Zero Trust AI Control and book a demo to see it in action at our link in the description. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the Short Circuit video on the Magic Screen a few months ago. It worked surprisingly well. It's almost like Apple was getting ready to have a touchscreen on the Mac.
