Apple's touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro launches November 6 as M6 model ends the old design

On November 6 Apple will release two new MacBook Pros, according to The Verge: an entry-level M6 model that amounts to a straightforward processor update in a familiar chassis, and the machine the company's pro line is presumably heading toward — a thinner, lighter MacBook Pro with an OLED display you can touch.

The first touchscreen Mac

The Verge reviewed the new flagship under its official name, the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, and it is the first Mac to ship with a touchscreen. The mechanism is deliberately simple: a tap on the screen registers as a mouse or trackpad click. According to the review, that works almost everywhere but not universally — some buttons in games ignored touch entirely, and there is no touch equivalent to hovering over a notification to reveal a close button.

Apple made only minor changes to macOS to accommodate touch, such as window-management buttons that expand when touched. Developers can build richer touch interactions into their apps, including multi-finger gestures, but The Verge expects little of that soon, since only this one top-tier model supports touch input.

OLED enables a smaller, lighter machine

The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and the 16-inch at $3,399, configured with either an M5 Pro or an M5 Max chip — roughly a $400 premium over a similarly specified standard MacBook Pro, and up to $14,549 fully loaded. The Verge's benchmarks put its M5 Pro test unit in line with other computers running the same chip, and the review describes the Pro and Max chips as particularly well suited to graphics-heavy work and local AI development.

The OLED panel allows slimmer bezels around a smaller Dynamic Island cutout, and it shrinks the machine itself: the 14-inch model weighs exactly 3 pounds, half a pound less than the standard Pro, while the 16-inch drops more than two-thirds of a pound. Apple redesigned the internal thermals both to fit the new body and to direct heat away from the OLED panel, which can degrade if it runs too hot for too long.

The port selection is unchanged — three Thunderbolt 5 ports plus HDMI, SD card and headphone jack — and battery life is similar to earlier models. The Verge's main hardware complaint is the speakers, which sound a bit boomy and hollow compared with previous Pros, though still better than most laptops.

The M6 model closes out the old chassis

The second launch is the M6 MacBook Pro, also available November 6, at $1,999 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. According to The Verge, the only internal changes are the processor — a 12-core M6, up from 10 cores in the M5 — and Apple's N1 networking chip, which brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Everything else, from the 120Hz miniLED display to the MagSafe port and three Thunderbolt 4 ports, carries over from the chassis Apple has used since 2021.

The Verge calls it probably the last MacBook Pro before the redesign, and suggests the OLED design could reach the entry-level model as soon as next year. The reviewer's practical advice is that base-model buyers should not pay the extra $900 for the OLED screen today, but should look for the new design once it spreads across the lineup.

Why it matters

The touchscreen reverses a position Apple held for well over a decade — The Verge notes that Steve Jobs publicly dismissed the idea of touch laptops — yet both reviews suggest touch is the least transformative part of the new machine. The bigger story is the OLED-driven redesign: thinner, dramatically lighter, with cooling engineered around the new panel. If The Verge's prediction holds, every MacBook Pro will look like this within a couple of years, which makes the M6 a transitional machine sold at a starting price $200 above what its predecessor launched at a year ago.