Everyone's focused on the touchscreen, but I'm seriously impressed how they managed to cut down the weight.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!
Macbook airs are lighter because they are smaller and lack fans (and maybe for other reasons too) so it is not comparable, but it is one of the reasons I like fanless laptops (whatever cuts a bit the weight for mobility is welcome).
For those not aware, the 100Wh limitation is not Apple, but imposed on them by the airline industry (IATA)[1]
Anything over >100Wh && <160Wh requires airline approval at individual passenger level. Anything >160Wh is classified as dangerous goods and must be prepared and packaged correctly and put in the hold.
Welcome to 2016. Lightweight OLED displays have been in the market since a decade ago, but now we are praising Apple for catching up 10 years later for a laptop with a "pro" moniker? Damn, the Apple ass-kissing here never disappoints.
In what regard are they falling behind? There are lighter laptops, sure. Are there lighter laptops with the same performance, or the same battery, the same ergonomics, the same build quality, or the same screen quality?
I pretty much daily use a MacBook Air and an arm windows laptop costing about half the price. I use the MacBook Air at home for administrative and basic tasks, but the arm laptop is actually useful and runs software that I need... MacBooks at this point are just like luxury cars they have way more features than they need and are polishing areas that appear good but not necessarily are good for everyday requirements.
What is the battery life of your windows laptop which is half the price? What is the screen quality? What is the single and multi core performance? Does it beat even the macbook neo on even one of these metrics? At the same cost?
I am a fan of OLEDs and have enjoyed secondary PC laptops with OLED, however, to be clear:
- Most OLED PCs were not anywhere as bright as the old MBP miniLED display.
- Almost all OLED PCs have terrible blue shift when viewed at an angle.
- Apple miniLED XDR displays are no slouches either. They are not quite OLED, but they implemented the dimming zones very well with uniform backlighting and deep blacks.
I have not seen Apple's on MBP, but I bet it meets or exceeds iPad Pro Tandem OLED which does not have the two problems above.
So no, it is not the same as the decade old PC OLED. And I have ignored all the potential durability issues.
TBH this is one of the things that will be a clear downgrade imo. Weight reductions and thinness are not free. The Pro and Max chip version are already over powered for the cooling system the current macbook pros have. And now they are further cutting into the laptop...
The display change itself likely accounts for some of the thickness and weight reduction. The mini-LED backlight grid on the previous displays wasn't nearly as thin or light as an OLED panel.
I heard that was a result of them designing for certain thermal envelopes ahead of time and Intel then delivering chips that didn't meet the specs they were promised. Not sure is this is what happened though so take with a grain of salt.
If this was the case, one the one hand they should be criticized for releasing such bad laptops on the market but if they had already decided on developing their own silicon then maybe it made sense to just accept that some generations of Macbook were going to have thermal issues and focus all efforts on the future.
Not sure why this is downvoted but it is a valid concern. I will wait and see some thermal testing as someone mentioned on new cooling design which I can't find on the page just yet.
It also thermally throttled like hell, was much thinner, and had much reduced IO. What's impressive is keeping the same form factor and IO selection, and still getting that weight reduction.
They might have changed the internal fan layout. If you look it AR mode, you can look underneath the display , there’s usually two fan exhausts there, this one has only one
But I also only have an m1 16” so it may not be a brand new change
Thats a side effect of the 1000+ dimming zones no? I snagged this ASUS ProArt display that was Professional Grade on eBay and among its many flaws is that its 1000+ dimming zones result in blooming whenever you have bright items on top of a complete black background. Makes it terrible for horror movies. :/
Yes. What I've never understood is why Apple, when they looked at it in prototype, didn't just adapt a color profile that latched black a few values higher (basically the opposite of crushing blacks). It would have meant the display would have had slightly worse blacks, but at least they would have been uniform. If Jobs had seen this display he would have thrown the device, and perhaps the designer, straight out of a window.
Sounds like maybe the Macbook Air could become the original 12 inch Macbook(2015) weight eventually. They might even re-introduce a 12 inch model. Imagine that!
I would have loved to get the decrease in weight, but I bought my Macbook Pro 128 GB in March and the equivalent is now 50% more expensive, from 5000 to 7500. The memory price skyrocketing is so bad but I don't know if it will ever get better or if these prices are the best we will ever see again.
thank god! at work many people intentionally choose the 14" just because of weight. Once you add the charger in, the 16" is very noticeable in a bag and makes you pack a little differently for flights.
Does anyone use/like touch on their windows (linux?) laptops? I've never really been drawn to wanting to do that. My mouse is far more accurate and doesn't block my view. But maybe it's just because I don't have it and I would find tons of uses for it. Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen. I guess I can understand for testing iOS/iPad apps but past that I just don't see myself wanting to use that.
Then again, it really doesn't matter to me at all what the screen looks like or what features it has, I use my MBP docked 99% of the time with the screen closed, to the point that my next computer will almost certainly be a Mac Studio and I'll just use my MBP on the rare occasions I need it on the go.
I've had a touch screen Lenovo for 10 years. It was a huge mistake and I never use it. It's uncomfortable and doesn't work with laptop interfaces or form factor.
All the cons are real (which Apple figured out in the aughts), but enshittification at a corporate bureaucracy is inevitable without a strong person in charge.
In my limited experience providing tech support for family members with touchscreen laptops, it's awful. The touch-targets are mostly designed for mouses, so they're easy to miss. Your screen gets filthy. Moving from keyboard to screen and back is tiring.
I'm sure there are good use-cases, but IMO everyday average-home-user computing is not one of them.
I got a Surface laptop/tablet hybrid thingy, which was weird at first to get used to, but actually kind of nice. I mostly got it for notetaking, drawing and 3D work, which it worked very well for, until the machine bricked itself during a Windows Update like a month after the warranty, and now it no longers powers up itself.
While it worked, it was useful for me, mostly the drawing I guess was the most different, as I used to use Wacom tablets for that, but seeing exactly where you draw makes things a lot easier.
If I was still in the market for a laptop, I'd probably again get a touch-based one, as long as it's not Microsoft, as that was the first and last time I bought any Microsoft hardware. Probably not Apple either as the OS and software is such a mess, so probably leaning Asus or Thinkpad with Linux on it, if anything.
I dislike it very much. It's never what I want, and in the cases where I have it, it generally only gets used accidentally (e.g. when one of my kids pokes the screen). It's not ergonomic for normal use.
I bought a laptop for a relative and didn't realise it doesn't have touchscreen. They complained for a day and I often saw them try to touch the screen and then being disappointed it doesn't work. Week later they never mentioned it again and use the laptop just fine.
When I was buying them a second one and asked about touchscreen, they said they don't care anymore for it, so second laptop also was without touchscreen.
It’s on my X1 Thinkpad. I find it more convenient to use the mouse as that’s where my hands are naturally and a habit.
However I have noticed that when I am dictating more using typeleas or whisperflow I use the touchscreen more as it’s more faster and has a good flow if you wanted speed
I got a 24" all in one computer with a touch screen because the kids were into drawing on the computer. The kids managed to scratch it up somehow, they had a stylus and I think the tip broke.
Anyway that experience made me think that touching a super high image quality screen will only lead to heartbreak. Better to use a cheap screen if you want to touch a lot.
I worked at MS when they were putting out win 8, so I'm maybe biased. I enjoyed the touch interface laptops but I'll fully acknowledge that in my case they were making up for a bad touchpad experience.
I had one a decade or so ago and I did use it because it was there, sometimes. But it’s not a feature I would ever go out of my way to get or pay extra for - the only thing I was looking forward to here is the oled so guess I’ll find out if I will use it.
Oh how far we've come. Steve Jobs in 2010 stated [1]:
> Steve Jobs told a crowd at an Apple event in 2010 that the company did “tons of user testing” on putting touchscreens on MacBooks and decided against it because, he said, “It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
> While previewing Mac OS X Lion in 2010, Jobs explained the main issue was comfort, saying, “After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”
Design is the art of compromise. A laptop works. Physical keyboards are better than onscreen keyboards. Laptops with detachable tablets end up with a heavier screen so the base has to be heavier so it doesn't tip over.
I honestly don't know what the use case for touchscreen Macbooks really is. OLED? Sure. Why not? But touch? Who is this for?
I want to argue that there’s been 15 years of UI experimentation since then. Occasional use is okay, but should be absolutely optional. As long as we don’t all get scammed to use touch as the primary UI like we did in cars.
It's not a huge thing. My Thinkpad has a touchscreen, a clickable trackpad, and 3 buttons on top of the trackpad. The only thing it doesn't have is a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard.
I use the trackpad most of the time, even for right and middle clicks (2/3 finger click), but I prefer the buttons when I have to select, and the middle button when I need to paste repeatedly. I don't use the touchscreen much, but it's the easiest way to swipe between virtual desktops on Linux. The touchscreen works well with the laptop turned "inside out" (my kid's laptop does that). Screen doesn't get smudges because of its texture. The example shown mentions the desktop swipe, and the piano keys are for setting up a chord, not playing a tune, both of which make sense (and try to set up a chord without multi-touch).
I have used Surface laptops for years and touch is a definite nice-to-have. I especially like having it when diagramming and designing. Paired with the Surface Pen is can really unlock a lot of digital whiteboarding experiences.
But based on the Ad, they did not show own usage and it doesn't look like the hinge is 180. If that's correct, Apple went absolutely against its own beliefs for UX/UI.
Writing on a laptop screen with a pen is kind of a crappy experience. The screen position is not rigid enough for that to be comfortable. It “bounces” as you write.
Windows benefits from a touchscreen more often on something like a diagram where you'll be panning around up/down/left/right, zooming, etc because the trackpad situation isn't very good.
I've never felt the need for a touchscreen when e.g. using Miro because I can scroll and all directions and zoom intuitively on the Mac's trackpad.
Eh. I don't think the Macbook's trackpad is that good. It's better sure, but it's still not as intuitive panning or rotating over the image directly on a touch screen. And it's still useless for drawing.
I use a Wacom Cintiq with touch, it is only useful for testing during mobile gamedev because it can simulate touch easily without leaving the editor and having to export a build to my phone or tablet. Quite an expensive trick. I wouldn’t purchase it again if it broke. (I would buy the same model without touch and save some bucks)
I've had it on a few laptops, I always disable it. My current work laptop is a Thinkpad which doesn't even have an option in the BIOS to disable its touchscreen, I had to write a udev rule to do it.
For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.
I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.
Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.
My wife loves her surface book specifically for the touch. No touch is what held her back from going Mac. She's a teacher and is constantly making assets and stuff in Canvas and those sort of things.
It is more a nice extra than truly useful. Especially if trackpad or keyboard are starting to have issues. On occasion it can be easy to just fat-finger an onscreen button or on a long read just gently scroll. On videos they can be paused by tapping the play window. This is probably a step in their grand scheme to further merge Mac and ios together.
A fun aside is a New York Times reporter pulled up some drawing app on his phone at a holiday party to show my kid and was visibly shocked when my kid just started creating using the on screen icons before the guy could even start tutoring him. I don't recall if the Microsoft thing had any intro or demo that guided him on the tools a little or if he just absorbed it.
I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.
I’ve had a few and liked it- is nice to be able to move my finger straight to a point on the screen and do something - is faster than using a mouse in some contexts
I've been an enthusiast for whiteboarding, diagramming and handwriting, and had several Work HP Tablets and 360s, for several years I found good use taking notes in OneNote (specifically) for in-person meetings, for any other use like video conferences (which every meeting is now), giving presentations on screen-share, using office tools, etc, they just aren't convenient and are more prone to activating the wrong element with inadvertent touch. I write notes on paper and scan them for archive. This Mac Book doesn't fold flat which really should make it a non-starter unless Apple has a use-case I can't think of.
As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.
As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)
Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.
Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).
Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.
It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.
> As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.
Perhaps, but on a Mac you can already do this via the touch pad.
Linux and Windows touchpad hardware and software is significantly more widely varying, usually ranging from "good lord, did any human ever try this?" to "I hate it but it's usually functional", with only a few outliers in the "this does what I expect" realms. Touch screens on the other hand have a 1:1 mapping for everything, and very nearly all of them support 5+ fingers (not just 1 or 2), so they almost always work like you expect. (... when they work at all on Linux)
I've used a few touch laptops. First one was a chromebook 9-10 years ago, and even then I got great use of the touchscreen just doing web browsing or navigating my files/google drive or scrolling through ebooks.
Always enjoyed touchscreens on my laptops. Nice thing is, you can just ignore it when you don't want it. It doesn't affect battery life, or thinness, or brightness, or clarity provided the implementation is good; it's just a bonus input method. I'll never say no to a laptop offering a touch option.
I found it was something I didn't appreciate much until I had a touchscreen laptop. It doesn't fully replace the mouse or touchpad, but it is convenient enough of the time that I miss not having it. It also is a much bigger benefit when you're using the laptop by itself. But when reading something on the couch, it's helpful to scroll with a touchscreen, and it's handy to quickly interact with modal dialogs.
I had a surface pro and later a surface book, and i think i can count on 1 hand the number of times i found touch to be useful. Might just be windows fighting me all the way, but i have since moved over to using Macs for work and never missed touch at all.
My work laptop has a touchscreen.
I use it so rarely that I keep forgetting it has one and every time I clean the screen with my fingers I get confused for a couple of seconds and then I remember.
I'm working on a very niche sports scoring app and designed it to have nice, clickable buttons. But when trying it out in the field one of the officials had a touch-screen laptop, and it was pretty nice for clicking/tapping to enter finishers of a race in order. So much so that I reworked the rest of the UI to allow for touch.
It's not a tablet-doable thing, really, and I don't really want to take the effort to get it in an app store. But adding touch-able buttons made it a bit nicer UI overall, so I'm glad I did it. Now this person, and anyone else, can also use it with a touch screen if so desired.
Something wrong with your computer. My 11 year old XPS13 with touch screen has worked fine in Linux ever since I got it. And same with my Surface Pro 2 running Ubuntu.
the convertible laptops are great, flip the screen back and use it like a big e-reader/ipad, if the macbook pro worked that way with full pencil compatibility (and being able to run all ipad apps) it'd have been amazing
Not a HUGE usecase, but when reading a longer text, webpage or something, I like to put my palm around the edge of the display, fingers from behind, use thumb for scrolling.
But I also only ever bought 2-in-1s. Not an obvious “must have” for me, but I prefer closing it “the other way around”, holding laptop in panorama rotation, when reading a pdf or something. I really don’t like reading longer texts on laptop opened in a typical “clamshell” way.
Not me personally, but my wife does. She will not buy a laptop unless it has touch screen. "So get an iPad" everyone tells her.
No, you don't get it. She wants the keyboard, she wants a first class desktop experience, and she wants a touch screen.
Watching her work is... different. She mostly uses her laptop on her lap, on the couch, scrolling and "clicking" with touch... and when she needs to type something she slides it back slightly, and types. Almost never uses the track pad.
This is how my 8-year-old works on her school Chromebook. And all of the kids at her school that I've seen using laptops are similar. Touch the screen to interact, type on the keyboard. I think they're just wired to believe every screen should be touchable and go with whatever is easiest for them in the moment.
Exactly. Why on Earth would they default to touching something away from the screen that's an imperfect map to it when they can just touch the thing they want directly? I've seen so many people saying they don't understand and would never use a touchscreen on a laptop, and I just have to think they've not really been around non-technical adults or children.
You lose control without a desktop and mouse. I can't even begin to count the number of times I got hit with a dark pattern where an app steers me in a direction that I can't click out of because on touch interfaces, you have less control.
Keyboard and mouse don't give you any more autonomy over the application developers state machine.
I'm not sure I understand the claim of "being in control". The UX is different, sure, often. But that's not "control" over the design of the application.
Huh that's really interesting because my 12 year old has been using a school-provided chromebook for 3 years now and she and all her peers almost NEVER use the touchscreen, they use the trackpad almost exclusively. And I've watched her using her ipad too, and she uses the touchscreen when she's in (her words) "that kind of app" but if she's in Google Docs she's 100% trackpad.
Yes unless you've seen nontech people use a touchscreen you won't get the appeal.
Some people don't intuitively use trackpads so they'll use a mouse and if they discover touchscreens that becomes a feature that needs to come with any laptop after that.
Yea, it's pretty funny seeing all the posts here from people who cannot fathom why a product like this exists.
It's pretty eye opening really. If it weren't for seeing someone close to me do it, I'd be in the same camp, wondering who in their right mind would use their laptop like that.
Same here. I couldn't understand it until like you and the comments before, saw younger generation all thought screens by default should be touchable, and other people casually scroll on the display and then return to keyboard for typing.
I hate it. It's beyond me why people would intentionally smudge their laptop display.
I guess if you have a laptop that functions in tablet mode, it makes sense (I don't love tablet modes either).
Someone called out the surface - which is great with the surface pen. I'll agree this is a great use case. I would say this use case is rarer than the prior use cases where you use your meat sticks.
The only reason I would want touch is if the screen would fold and rotate in order to turn it into a tablet. If Apple made this in a 12-inch format (like their old 12-inch MacBook I'd buy it immediately.
No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare. Especially since you can already pinch-and-zoom and do other gestures with the existing touch pads!
> No idea why anyone would want a laptop form factor with a touch screen; seems like an RSI nightmare.
I have no idea how this keeps getting repeated. No one with a touchscreen laptop is just hovering their arms in front of the screen like a zombie for hours.
It’s another input. You use it when it makes sense. For some, that’s pretty frequent. For others like you, maybe never.
I'm not the target for this particular product either and you and I use our MBPs in pretty much identical ways. I will say though, if the laptop's hinge allowed reverse clamshell like the Yoga, then I would consider the premium for a feature I would rarely use. I like the idea of a tablet, but any time I'm seated with one, I'm either doing something I'd do on my phone or doing something that I'd rather be doing on my computer running a desktop OS.
Unlike you I don't see myself switching to the Studio or Mini. My MBP has been extremely performant and its capability of on the go work makes it the perfect product IMO!
The set of people who use convertible laptops in tablet mode seems tiny. It’s one of those things that looks like a great idea but doesn’t pan out in real life. Everyone uses it once, says “cool” and never uses it again. 13” tablet that weighs as much as a laptop is not a great form factor.
100%. My POV is really just "if I could fold my MBP into a tablet without any compromise, and that feature costed an extra couple hundred more than an equally specced non-touch MBP, I probably would go for it and barely use it"
I use it constantly. No one actually holds their hands up to the screen for extended periods of time. But touching the screen to click a button can be more efficient than tabbing or mousing to it. Especially if the laptop is on your lap.
Scrolling through long docs is also comfortable with touch if it’s on your lap or a flat surface directly in front of you. You scroll with the thumb while your hand/arm rests comfortably.
I can’t be the only one who recoils in horror at the thought of TOUCHING THE SCREEN! It’s like going to the toilet and not washing your hands after. I’m sure people do it, but..ew.
I didn't think of it before but now I won't be able to avoid thinking about it. I got to carry one of those rubber styluses whenever I go to fast food places now. :/
Unless there is some immunity problem in your body, this will only make you sicker over time. Your body handles random bacteria just fine. It doesn’t handle being prevented from experiencing any dangerous interactions for 5 years straight, then trying to fight off an infection with a severely undertuned immune system.
Touch things with your hands. Your body literally needs it to be healthy. Avoiding it ONLY makes you sicker in the end.
Can’t be any worse than the contents of the food they’re ordering. I mean, nobody goes to McDonalds expecting to leave healthier than when they arrived.
well i have a couple of laptops at work that are dedicated to programming/test software.
A touch screen would be actually better than a laptop, but android tablet won't cut it (we make some of the test hardware so are in control of the drivers, but for most of it we don't)
I actually disable touch screen in bios on my Dell XPS13 because I don't like touching it accidentally but then I'm not the target market for a touchscreen laptop.
I guess for the most part if you like this you'll use it and if you don't you'll just ignore it.
> Also, I don't love the idea of putting fingerprints all over my screen.
Whenever someone wants to point out something on my screen, I’ve already mentally prepared for the next step of having to wipe the screen, because it’s impossible to point at something without contacting the glass. Apparently.
My daughter, when she pointed something out to me on my laptop screen, ALWAYS touched the screen from the time she could walk. When she was a teenager I asked her repeatedly to please stop touching the screen when she pointed something out, but I gave up.
I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon a couple of years ago for my linux laptop and had been using it for months before I realized when I was wiping a smudge off of the monitor that it was a touch display! It was quite the surprise. I have yet to find it of any value.
I had the same thing happen to me with a company issued HP laptop years ago. There were like a dozen of us in a meeting at the time and it blew our minds lol It was basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Goz0PnhEg8.
It's expectation. Think of all the screens in your life that you interact with and when you can't touch them it feels broken (at least to me). So I don't use my laptop as a tablet but when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button. Or I'm helping someone with a task and reaching to move a window directly is natural.
> when some dialog pops up I want to touch the cancel button
I have never had this. I don't think this is the expectation among people using laptops either? Pressing escape is much faster, doesn't obscure the screen, and doesn't require me to aim.
I bought an expensive Windows laptop with touch and I go so long without every touching the screen it's always a complete shock when someone touches it -- you know, the screen touchers -- and it registers. And for a brief moment I remember that I bought a touchscreen convertible, and then forget it again.
It's neat I guess, but he finger is a terrible mouse, obstructs the screen, and it's super awkward. It is a spec sheet checkbox like so many things where people do the "But it doesn't have this {must have} so it sucks" bit of nonsense, and Apple fell for it.
I don’t have a dedicated tablet, and use a touchscreen laptop that’s “folded back” in lieu of that. It’s not as good but cheaper than two devices. To me it’s inherently a budget tool. An €3300 touchscreen laptop doesn’t really compute.
I use a stylus to take lecture notes and solve problem sheets on my ThinkPad X13. Xournalpp works ok, Ubuntu 24.04, though there was a mutter bug that I had Sol patch out. Only better than paper because of data storage, honestly carrying a notebook is lighter than the usb c second display I use.
When I have it folded, it's intuitive to use the touchscreen like a tablet. But I wouldn't want to run the i3 setup I have on my desktop. The Wayland UI bandwagon and huge touch targets are for something after all.
But it sucks to use application designed for mouse with touch.
So it's not that "touch is bad UX modality" it's "applications should be designed for touch as first class citizen" and by design I mean _proper_ design as in from the ground up not just prettier colors and slihgtly tweaked layout.
Yes. I have my dock/taskbar on the side and to switch between apps it's like having a small touchbar I actually know the functions off. When I want to scroll too or tap quickly on something on the other side of the screen, it's also profitable to lift my fingers away from the keyboard to touch the screen without even moving the pointer. But if you're not used to it you probably don't see the burden of moving your pointer away to then bring it back to the center of the screen.
Another possible use is when I want to show some page or content to someone, I always prefer manipulating it with my fingers, instead of "remotely" control it from the trackpad and a mouse.
And if it has stylus support it's cool for drawing (like my current laptop) but Macs do not have a hinge suited for that I think (no 360° support and their focus on a "weak hinge" for the weird and useless obsession from tech content creators of being able to lift the hinge with one finger, something I actually not really value because I sometimes wish that the hinge was stronger and sometimes weaker)
When they introduced the Apple Pencil and people were like “haha it’s a stylus”, the thing was decidedly NOT a stylus (it actually couldn’t be used to control some parts of the UI). It was an actual digital pen, something that used to be specialized and expensive external hardware, and it worked beautifully with the iPad. It was literally “stylus but GOOD”. I saw it and thought “people will make memes about this, but Apple totally gets it”.
When they introduced the Vision Pro, VR was just kind of shit. Bulky, ugly, uncool. Vision Pro tried to resolve some of the issues, but it was still kind of half-assed. Like they wanted to have a VR device but couldn’t actually make it work. Good resolution, but not great. Vergence-accomodation conflict not addressed. Still bulky and ugly. Isolation kind of addressed (with the AR-ish UX and the “see-through” display), but not enough.
Now we got the foldable iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook.
Foldable phones are still awfully delicate and the whole concept doesn’t have a clear “killer” use case. There’s no new UX, no new features, it’s just an iPad Mini in a marginally smaller device that’s expensive as hell. Apple didn’t even try to address the obvious shortcomings, they just built the same stupid thing everyone else is failing to sell.
Touchscreen laptops still wobble, they still get covered with fingerprints, they’re still uncomfortable and there’s still no meaningful UX. This thing doesn’t even try to address any of that. Their marketing images literally just show hands hovering above the keyboard and touching the screen for no good reason. They’ve been mocking touchscreen laptops for years now and now they release one like it’s the most obvious thing ever. 1984 vibes.
That’s not a killer use case, that’s just running two apps next to each other. There are tons of phones and tablets that can do that.
I want to know why I want my phone to cost twice as much and have a dozen delicate moving parts in order to fold. Like the movie quote: “sell me this pen”. I’m waiting for someone to sell me a folding phone. I thought Apple would be able to do it, but they haven’t even tried.
> Now we got the foldable iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook.
And the HomeView, which also feels like it lacks a clear “killer” use case.
Maybe I’m just not the intended audience for any of these products, but I’m also starting to wonder if Apple are throwing things at a wall and hoping something will stick.
I had one for work a while back that could turn around so the screen faced upward while closed, effectively making it a bulky/heavy tablet. It was convenient for walking over to someone desk and discussing a topic. But it wasn't ground breaking enough for me to ever seek something out like it again. I rarely even open my laptop these days unless I'm in a conference room.
Kids expect all screens to be touch ready. Chromebooks they learn on in schools are touchscreen. It will be a competitive requirement before long, I think.
I used to work regularly on a commuter train with a firm-provided touchscreen ThinkPad. The touchscreen was great on the train because it was faster (for many things) than reaching for the trackpad. And when you're in a sort of cramped sitting position, reaching forward feels natural.
I'm a lawyer by trade and am forced to lean on GUIs with little keyboard-control support. When I code (for pleasure), I don't miss the touchscreen, but I often miss it when I'm trying to read PDFs and Word documents on the go.
It would be interesting to know what ThinkPad model it was. The older ones had pretty small trackpads so they were difficult to reach.
On Macbooks the trackpad is so large that you can reach it even from the sides of the laptop and the two finger scrolling actually works without second thought.
I look for touchscreens when looking for a cheap windows laptop for someone because they tend to be better quality screens (IPS, decent brightness, etc.) instead of some awful TN panel that's barely visible in a well-lit room.
I don't really expect anyone to use it as a touchscreen, but if they do, at least that will work too.
Getting rid of the fixed keyboard helps a lot (my preferred form factor), but even in the classic laptop form factor is makes a ton of sense IMHO.
There's a lot of small niceties that pile up into a better experience, the sister comments cover a bunch of those, so I'll focus on a macos specific nice point:
iPad and iPhone apps can now get direct touch when running on a laptop, instead of the mouse mode. With this, there is now a perfect platform able to run Mac, iOS and iPad apps outside of the ill-fated Vision Pro.
That's too little to late for me, but I think many will appreciate the benefits.
I've been trying to brainstorm a helpful use case this would bring but I can't think of anything.
I mean just imagine how jarring it is to go from touching the macbook screen to mess with your app to needing to input text. Whether you use the macbook keyboard, or the on screen keyboard, it's just kinda rough.
Oh in university it's a godsend having something you can just run PDF Annotator on and draw with a pen directly on your laptop. (Lenovo 20KK user here, got it for 200€ at a hamvention used, even came with a 4G modem)
I feel the same but I noticed that the boomers and Gen Z both reach for the screen when I am showing them something and they want to interact with it(i.e. scroll a page or close a window).
Maybe the the intuitive and natural way of interaction is touch and the generations between the boomers and the Gen Z are the only ones who command the skillset to use computers in any other way.
It seems like there’s an audience among older people and possibly children, but I don’t see a situation in which a professional at least would really or want a touchscreen. Do you really want the oil from your fingers constantly smudging up your screen, particularly a glossy one? Unless it comes with a pair of complimentary Apple windshield wipers, it's gonna get gross fast.
The only situation I could see it being useful in is if it came with a pressure-sensitive pen, so you could use it for sketching and drawing. But even then, that would only really work well if the screen folded all the way around, so it would sit flush against the base or if it opened 180 degrees, so you could lay it flat on a table without it wobbling around on a hinge.
I have a Macbook Pro 14 first gen and I love this machine but watching what Apple is doing lately I think they are starting to loose the plot.
A foldable iPhone, macbooks with touch displays, apple watches constantly listening to your conversations, dropping updates for not so old devices like AWU 1, I understand that I am not a target audience for those products but to me this just speaks a lack of vision for the company and their products. I mean this is one of the most valuable companies in the world with some of the best people working there and this is the best that we can get a foldable iphone and a touch display I don't believe it.
The last keynote also was probably the worst one I ever saw couple of years ago I couldn't wait for keynotes this year I am totally over them we are at the Tron meme scene where one the board member asked what was new in the new OS version and seems to be just the number - [0]
Exactly what i was thinking, with these decision they are making a quick bucks but in the long term apple will just be another washed and forgetful brand like most of the windows brand, and then what reason to get a macbook ?
They worked so hard to "think different", get a following with people that would willingly spend more for a product inferior technically because it was just bold.
i am the first one to appreciate the direction apple is taking, as a customer it will bring even more competition to the windows laptop market because everything will be similar, but when i put my self in steve jobs shoe, i want to puke.
These are the devices people use all day every day. Iterating on them makes sense.
They are also working on AirPods with vision, released a home hub with display, released AR goggles, releasing GPU heavy servers, creating a framework for AI interfaces, …
Their demo example for the touch interface is piano keys? That's a 2010 Scott Forstall level of skeuomorphism that doesn't translate well for a laptop screen because it's not convenient.
The hands are also almost in the exact same image Steve Jobs had on a slide during the iPad keynote showing touch on a laptop is not ergonomic. It's poetic, almost.
"We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work," Jobs said at the company's "Back to the Mac" event in 2010. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off," Jobs continued. "It doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible."
Well my arms didn't get longer, that's for sure. Also MacOS and software made for MacOS doesn't optimize for touch targets unlike something that will be distributed on iOS/iPadOS.
Not that novel. The first ergonomics studies on touchscreens were done in the seventies. In 2010, touchscreens were already sophisticated technology and well established in many settings.
I got my first laptop with a digital pen and touchscreen in 2008 or so. They were rare back then, but nothing groundbreaking new. The touchscreen did suck though.
How is it convenient? A pro workflow is not holding your arm with the finger up in the air trying to avoid accidental taps, when you can get a small 25 key akai midi controller for a 100 usd. And it's easy to carry around and comes with velocity-sensitive keys and pressure-sensitive pads.
Macbook Pros attempt to cater to every slim use case simultaneously, with the idea that if they can handle a use case someone else can’t, they’ll sell another laptop.
From past experience (not for quite a few years, but some at least): oh heck no. I loved simulating locally, but the deeply limited touch handling made it infeasible a lot of the time. The dev -> install -> run -> dev cycle is dramatically faster in the emulator, and you don't need to have multiple devices nearby if you're building custom UI for each size.
I think there was a modifier key + click and drag to simulate a pinch, so at least some gestures can be simulated. But since one is developing for the mobile device, it makes sense to tether the device and send builds to test out on the target device itself.
As a longtime laptop musician, using the QWERTY keyboard to play notes in the absence of a MIDI controller is infinitely preferable to this goofy demo.
Apple better have some better use examples than THAT.
Reminds me of that stupid DJ demo of the touch bar. Did any DJ actually use that in practice? Well if they do they better hold on to their now vintage MacBook.
I agree that a piano demo seems like a bad idea. But damn if I don’t daily long for the iOS 6 days where buttons and tappable areas were well defined and there were some fun and whimsy to the interface. As compared to the flat unintuitive desolate landscape of recent years. I would rather have a big animated cassette deck in my music player than the current overly polished full page advert I get every time I open the app. At least Forstall and his team cared enough.
Yeah, piano playing was a bad example. There’s a reason MIDI keyboard manufacturers try so hard to replicate the weighted feel of a real piano. Your fingers need feedback.
An interesting aside here, there is no one, true style of action for keyboard instruments and no one, true type of feedback.
I have a good 88-note hammer action stage piano. I love it for acoustic pianos and it's OK for electric pianos (Rhodes, Wurlitzer) but it sucks a bit for organ, clavinet and synths.
I've seen people play Hammond really, really well on a weighted keybeds but it's much easier to just plug a second cheap(er) synth action controller in for organ parts.
I've never met anyone that really liked playing a tablet screen though. :P
I'm going to offer a use case for touch screens: Augmented reality (AR) development.
I think there's a real possibility that AR takes off in the next 1-5 years. The combination of LLMs + smaller AR glasses makes AR a viable computing platform.
For example, simple things like, "Where are my keys?" is a lot easier to solve if (a) you're wearing your AR glasses already and (b) they have access to a frontier LLM.
However, it's very difficult to simulate "touching something" in AR using a mouse/trackpad and keyboard. What if you want to "twist open" a peanut butter jar? I could imagine touching the screen and twisting my fingers in a rotational pattern along the top of the can.
What's the point of a touch display if the laptop doesn't have a 360 hinge !? The interaction looks very awkward and unless they stiffen the hinge compared to previous model, the thin screen will keep tilting backwards.
My wife sits on the couch, "indian style", with a laptop in her lap angled at about a 45 degree. She holds the edges of it with her arms, and brings the keyboard up to her stomach kinda...
Its hard to describe but its surprisingly comfortable looking and allows her to tap her way through everything without actually having to hold the screen up. If she lets go, the hinge keeps it up. If she needs to type, she just skoots it back back slightly
I’m not going to upgrade to get this, however given most devices are touch screen it has become almost expected. Sometimes you just want to move something with your fingers even if it’s not the main input method.
Personally I find I miss touch screen after using my iPad and Magic Keyboard for extended periods and then switching back to the laptop. I mostly use the keyboard but it’s very nice to be able to scroll, position things, etc
There's no universe this doesn't negatively affect the UX of the OS for non-touch users. You can't simply support (or rather you can half-arse) new affordances without contorting the rest of the already well worn paths.
I'm still on Sequoia for this reason. I want a UI optimized for displaying text content and mouse and keyboard control. Mostly keyboard. I definitely don't want the larger border radius on the windows that would seem to be designed for touch.
Isn't that his point though ? Their plan seems to half-ass touch support (i.e. the menu bar, minimize/close buttons, etc. all stay in their current size), so it seems like a waste of hardware to include a touch screen just for very little functionality. If instead they make the UI friendly to fat fingers, they'd very much affect the mouse/trackpad experience.
Does that mean you also believe the same to be true for mouse affordances ruining it for keyboard users and vice-versa? Or "touch" is special in this regard?
Mouse affordances don't usually ruin it for keyboard preferrers. Keyboard shortcuts and control are often an afterthought or downright written off because "they can just click" but thats down to laziness or lack of care than some hard and fast rule. However, a keyboard affordance is usually invisible, and a mouse affordance isn't, so they can very happily co-exist without affecting one another. For instance, the Alt modifiers in menus in classic Windows, those have almost no effect at all on anyones ability to click the menu item with a mouse.
Touch affordances and UI does have to be visible, and there is only one screen. So the touch affordances and mouse affordances are mutually exclusive: targets get larger, padding expands, UI gets dumbed down, etc etc.
I can't think of cases where mouse affordances necessarily, intrinsically make things worse for keyboard users.
Of course, there's the extremely common case of keyboard support being half-assed or missing from GUI apps. But that's not mouse affordances making things worse, that's developers just not having the time or inclination to have great keyboard support.
Whereas, touch affordances seem like they'll be a lot more disruptive.
Er… Yes they have. Liquid Glass is awful. It’s not only ugly (that’s preference, though), it has definitely negatively affected the UX. That’s why they’re adding sliders and options and reversal left and right.
Density is way down on UI elements for one. OS X used to feel like a Workstation. With every release macOS feels closer to a toy. Touch is great for convenience, but not getting into the weeds with “real” work.
Windows did this seemingly by not caring that it's also a touch screen, so not everything in the system is touch-friendly. It's still fine for many situations.
I can actually see a possibility where this improves UI/UX a bit. One being the removal of some many hover-over UI elements, e.g., the (x) button on notifications do not display unless a mouse is hovering over the notification badge.
So, it may makes things a little easier for some GUI scripting. I can also see the UX improving for some disabilities, but I know that is merely coincidental rather than intentional.
It already has, see the massive increase in UI padding in Tahoe and later. Windows and GNOME both sacrificed their UX to support touchscreen laptops years ago, Apple was one of the holdouts before that point.
Touch is probably not going to be useful in most contexts, but there are two things that come to mind:
1. Since many iOS apps can run on Apple silicon Macs now, this might be useful for apps where touch matters for more than just clicking buttons.
2. For mobile app developers, you can actually try real touches events on the simulator/emulator while developing and get better sense of how it feels without needing to pull out a physical device.
I have a touchscreen on my Googlebook (I know, early adopter issues galore, but I love mine now). I basically forget I have it most of the time, but every now and then, it's been cool.
Not letting the screen bend back all the way neuters every avantage of touch. Touch interfaces are incredibly frustrating when the thing you are touching doesn't have enough resistance.
For those wondering about the use case for touch screen, anytime you are showing info to someone and need to scroll the screen it’s much easier with a touch screen. I’ve encountered it most at doctors offices. Also scrolling through pictures with a client, or going through excel sheets with payroll is just easier using touch while sharing.
And let’s be honest, I bet those of us that use touch screens often enough have instinctively touched their laptops screen trying to scroll it on more than a few occasions, I know I’m guilty of it.
I have a limited understanding of local LLMs, but from what I gather 128GB is not enough to match DeepSeek v4 Flash or GPT 6.1 Luna. And these models are so cheap right now. What's the use case besides having your data locally?
While personally I’m not using them for work, just tinkering, 128GB can run qwen 3.8 flash next at q4(~111GB gguf). That model seems to be quite capable from what I’ve read.
It’s quite evident that the api models can and have been nerfed at the provider’s discretion, then there’s the abliteration aspect too(api models refusing what they consider “harmful”) which makes the case for local.
"Having your data locally" is definitely the biggest one.
- The general consensus seems to be that the frontier models are kind of (understandably) "benchmaxxed" towards coding benchmarks and have suffered in some other areas like writing, art, etc. Lot of tweaked/specialized models on huggingface
- Getting around the censorship in commercial models
- While local models don't match frontier coding agents, you can run them for multiple 24/7 with a long running goal (The fans in Macs are presumably not built to run 24/7, but this can be mitigated to a considerable extent IME by simply pointing a desktop fan at it, and you can throttle things in software. On the discrete GPU side of things, you can usually get big power savings without much performance impact by throttling the GPU clock; things are usually bottlenecked on memory)
- Even small 27B/35B models are getting darn good, definitely more than powerful enough for classification etc... you don't need 128GB to run them
- Right now, providers like OpenAI are running at huge losses. At some point, they are going to need to turn a profit, at which point they may get significantly more expensive, and "hosting your own" may make more economic sense than it does today -- and be a valuable professional skill, even.
- Even more speculative: perhaps the future for many applications is training and running your own hyper-specialized models. Right now, training your own is nowhere near cost effective on self-hosted hardware vs. renting GPUs
Note: whether any of these use cases are "worth it" is up to the individual. I'm not trying to sell anybody on the idea. I don't personally do much local LLM stuff at the moment, but it's attractive and I've been close to pulling the trigger...
I'm just trying to understand what the particular uses people have for them.
My raw data alone is terabytes, and it takes hundreds of GB sometimes to run very simple analyses. So there's no way I can have a local AI orchestrating the analyses locally.
But I realize some people have different kinds of data. So I'm interested to hear how exactly people use local models.
The point where it'd make sense for me is if someone makes a compact machine with 512 of unified memory in a couple of years and it costs less than a down payment for a house...
At this point it's pretty certain they've skipped M6 Pro/Max or they'd be a flagship feature of today's laptop.
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
These are right at the edge of desirable for me right now -- but it's hard to pull the trigger. I'm imagining an M7 Pro with 480 GB/s and therefore an M7 Max 850-900 GB/s. And significantly better GPU speeds as well. If I knew I could get the M7 Max Q2 of next year, especially at 192GB of RAM, I'd wait.
But then you have to compare to buying a GB200, sticking it in a closet and sharing it out in a workgroup and having a lower specced laptop. Decisions..
Notably these chips came out back in March of this year. Today's changes are in the display and form factor but maintaining the same CPU, GPU, and memory specs.
Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.
I almost can't imagine a laptop that is less for me. But for the people it is for (like my wife) it's hard to imagine one that's for them more. Really fascinating feeling—kinda glad this exists, even if not for my benefit!
Pro tip always get the silver macbooks because they wear out considerably better. On the black ones the paint near the charger ends up looking terrible and any dents/nicks/scratches look bad.
Annoys me to no end that fun colors are limited to the "cheap" lines like the Neo, Air, and Duo while Pros are boring. If I'm spending $4k on a laptop then why can't I get it in green? It genuinely makes no sense.
Except there is no "paint". Neither are there any "black ones"; space grey isn't very close to black, and I've seen no wear issues of any kind on any of the Macs I support.
Champagne/Starlight is definitely the way to go when available. Starlight especially, it's mostly silver but sometimes the light catches it just right to give it this sort of iridescent gradient to a light gold.
I liked the old Gold they used in the mid 2010s too.
Between open-weight models largely not worth their salt, and me setting up a VPS to do all my development now because I kept running into CPU limits with my M1 Pro, I think I'm just going to replace the battery on my M1 Pro and wait until a MacBook Pro with cellular arrives.
It's wild to think that even just 12 months ago, I would have hailed the touchscreen MacBook Pro. Now I don't need much more than an Air. (I also did more video editing back then, whereas now I don't really do it) (and I also want to play games)
But those quadrants still had options for upgrades. I think people vastly misunderstand that chart. It was about reducing product lines down because the Apple of the 90s had too many models that all varied very subtly.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
A laptop starting at almost 3 grand with only 24gb ram is a tragedy, the RAMpocalypse is brutal.
Basically $400 premium for a screen upgrade. I'm sure the screen is brilliant but mini LED is very much not bad. It's a real bummer that we seem to be entering an era where each year with tech it leans more towards a new product offering that is more but for more money versus getting more for our dollar consistently.
OLED feels pretty established at this point... could they really not have pulled off just making that the default screen on pro's or is this just a price gouge for a premium feature.
It's interesting that they've decided to release a new high-end model this year even though they aren't coming out with new high-end M6 chips. Apparently they have decided to not make Pro/Max versions of the M6 in favor of accelerating development of the M7 series, which will have improved support for on-device AI. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
Yeah they have done this for awhile now. It is weird to have your cheapest base model option outperform your MUCH more expensive configs on single core perf though.
For work I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen and these were the only times I have wanted to use it:
1. The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better.
2. I wanted to draw in a whiteboarding tool. Drawing with my finger is not ideal so I tried a passive stylus. Drawing with a passive rubber-tipped stylus leaves a lot to be desired. I would much rather use an active stylus or a pen display for artists if I could.
Apple is known for the best trackpads. They have set the bar high and they have consistently met that bar for over a decade. I don't need a touch screen for gestures when their trackpad feels just as good. To my next point, there is no pen support on this screen.
Given this, I feel the touch screen is going to be seen just like the touch bar, a pretty feature that receives some good niche support, but ultimately does not align with how the majority of users use a laptop. I just hope there's an option to turn off the touch screen when they inevitably start shifting this display down to the base model.
"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."
probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.
replacing the notch with a hole punch isn't much of an improvement for me anyway. it still kills the top quarter inch of the display for non-letterboxed movies, games etc. I'm tempted to replace my Air with a Neo just to have a non-punctured screen.
The touch screen is such a silly idea here. It even looks ridiculous in their own marketing photos. [1] The keyboard and track pad are already a great combo for getting things done.
I don't get why they're doing this other than making another step towards unifying iOS and macOS (and visionOS?).
I agree. The ergonomics of using a touch screen on a laptop screen aren't great. It only really works if you convert it to a tablet so that the screen is closer to you and angled up a bit for comfort, but it's no longer a laptop, so why bother?
That's an additional device, additional financing potentially on a different life cycle, potentially a different account to manage.
For a dedicated iOS dev that's worth the hassle, for someone managing a team of devs or employees only needing apps to run without requiring a full dev env, it's quite convenient and potentially cheaper.
If only we could discuss the OLED display rather than an optional feature. I did not see anything in the marketing materials that indicated I would be punished for refusing to utilize the touchscreen.
I think half of y'all are trying to justify your most recent MBP upgrade. Those of us still on the M1 are probably looking at this thinking about how fortunate it is that we've waited this long.
Yeah, if you can turn off or ignore the touch part, there's a whopper of a weight savings, a better display panel, and improved thermal performance hiding in this package.
Steve had been an outspoken critic of touchscreen laptops. It seems that none of his original gripes are addressed in this release. Another drop in the bucket of half-assed hardware releases from apple "our competitors have it so we need it too" (vision pro, new homepod thing, iphone duo, etc)
Similar feelings about the Duo. Very little innovation beyond what is offered by Androids. In fact, I feel like there are many foldable Android phones that offer better hardware (Motorola Razr Fold comes to mind). I say this as someone who is a huge Apple Fanboy and got a Duo on release day.
are you still on the same macbook? Im using the same config and its running solid, note from above is true on the darker colored version, getting some color changes, but its still a beast of a machine.
Not the poster but I'm also still using my M1 Max 32 GB RAM Macbook bought at the end of 2022 (yes, just right before the M2 Max...) and see no reason to buy another. Also paid 3400 (euros).
Not who you responded to, but I am. M3 Max with 128GB and I use every bit of it for photo/video editing and local building/compiling heavy projects. I'm glad I took this configuration then with the way prices are now and don't see myself replacing this for another few years.
Really glad I'm not currently shopping for a new computer.
It's also pretty fucking sad how this thing comes with less RAM than my low-end Mac Studio from 2022. I only upgraded from a 512 GB SSD to 1 TB, and I still have 32 GB. And even still, I paid 2599€ for it, where as the OLED MacBook Pro is 4049€.
They have had people asking them for touchscreen laptops for years. They legitimately lose sales to people who want a Mac but refuse to buy a laptop without a touch screen.
I think this is the wrong device to start with, though. The demand for touchscreens is probably highest in the cheapest lines. But presumably this will trickle down over the next few years.
When I saw rumours of it being touch I thought it would be a continuation of the iPhone Duo* idea but swapping between MacOS and iPadOS with a detachable keyboard, so if you are detached you have a screen, ipadOS and touch, if you plugin the keyboard it has additional hardware and macOS "swaps in" like some companies have attempted in the past
I've always thought the ideal future is to have the phone just be the desktop when docked, if computing advances well enough, and super disappointed this is just some random touch laptop.
The OLED is great as I use a 32" 4k 240hz OLED on MacOS and it has made a huge difference in my eye strain but I don't understand the point of the touch without a proper use for it.
* that you can use the Duo folded 90deg like a mini laptop.
Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?
EDIT: I already can’t stand when people touch my display just to point at something, I definitely don’t want my own oily fingerprints smeared all over a screen I spend all day looking at.
You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.
Touch screens on laptops are a bit like 4k screens or >60Hz screens. You don't expect to get much out of them, but once you're used to them, going back is annoying.
Everything from my watch to my printer has a touch screen, it's kind of strange how long Apple has held out, especially with the ultra expensive market they target with their laptops.
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
I’ve felt for years that they were holding out until they could make a dual touchscreen MacBook work and be a peak experience. I was expecting an iPhone duo type MacBook. That hasn’t happened.
Who plays a musical keyboard on a vertical surface? Nobody.
Some of their examples are absolutely ridiculous, for sure. The lack of a fold-back design, like the surface, with pencil support is also a surprise to me. I suppose they'd still rather sell you an iPad with an operating system they don't let you control rather than bringing their laptop segment up to par with the competition.
But having had to emulate pinch-zoom in an Android emulator has made me wish I had my touch screen laptop back. Emulated touch events also don't work like real touch events, so web dev can also be a bit annoying sometimes.
My company once gave me a touchscreen laptop and I did know that until I touched the screen by accident. It was fun to play but I never found it useful. I heard many people saying the same, some of them even preferred to disable. I find it uncomfortable to touch a laptop screen... The only thing seems to benefit from that for me is photo editing apps or 3D modelling.
So, I'm curious about how you use it. Do you have a specific use case where touchscreen made you life easier?
It's just small things. I don't have a touch screen laptop anymore, but being able to physically tap things or reaching over to touch things just felt natural.
I have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that also acts as a trackpad, yet I rarely use mouse mode on it. Seeing kids interact with laptops for the first time and touching the screen expecting them to work like every other device they use is also probably a sign of the times.
I understand why not everyone likes them, though. Some people prefer to disable their trackpads too, or prefer ball mice, or prefer mouse gestures over keyboard gestures. To each their own. I welcome the diversity.
The pencil is bad enough but how it charges itself is even worse. Lets turn my ipad into a brittle stingray. It's up there with the mouse having to charge upside down for apples top own goals.
when i'm in a supine position like in bed with my knees up... i will unfold my framework pro to 180º and use my thumb to scroll docs etc. only downside is smudge marks on the screen which rly irritate me.
You're not alone. Though, I wonder if this means better coating, the coating on the existing MacBooks (but not the M1's) get damaged far too easily when in a bag.
I've had a Thinkpad with a touch screen and I loved it. Sometimes touching something on the screen is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse, moving the cursor, and then clicking.
Although it's a lot more useful on laptops that can fold into a tablet, which neither MacBooks nor my Thinkpad can do.
Their marketing web page shows someone poking with their fingers at the virtual keyboard and it's so cringe. Who is going to use their laptop that way? For pro workflows? Pros have midi keyboards with pads and those are even not that expensive.
I would love a tablet running macOS, which I prefer over Windows and desktop Linux. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 7. It performed fine under Windows 10, though performance suffered when upgrading to Windows 11. The Surface Pro is a nice piece of hardware, but I wish it had macOS instead of Windows. The iPad Pro definitely has enough processing power to run macOS, but it runs iPadOS, which is too restrictive for me as a developer.
If Apple went through the effort making macOS touchscreen-ready for this new MacBook Pro, then perhaps we’ll see a tablet with macOS one day. I’d buy an iPad Pro with macOS in a heartbeat.
1) Youth expect all screens to be touch. They are learning how to use computers in school on touchscreen Chromebooks. Apple knows they must adapt to user expectation.
2) AI is forcing UI evolution that is hard to anticipate, but I suspect will be served well by having more kinds of inputs available in advance.
It's got a very interesting pixel layout, different even from previous tandem OLEDs. Hard to describe quickly in words, but shown in Figure 2 here: https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/pdf/... I imagine some of the C-shaped empty space is probably to accommodate the per-pixel emitter transistor.
For those HDR video editing / color grading specialists, how do these compare to Samsung + LG OLED TVs, Sony HDR Reference Monitors, or else?
I’ve always been interested in HDR video (HDR 10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG) and have wondered if the marginal upgrade in producer display quality will further impact the consumer HDR consumption. Also I think it’s noteworthy that they showcase DaVinci Resolve instead of Final Cut Pro, which is their own non linear editor and color grading app.
I wasn't sure how I would feel about my newish MBP M5 Max when they released this, but given the price increase, and the fact that I have zero interest in a better screen since I dock most of the time, I am happy I paid $2K less for the same horsepower earlier this year.
Update: The one nice thing I noticed is the weight of the 16" is only 4.1lb vs. 4.7lb from the previous model. I guess OLED is a lot lighter. THAT would be nice.
I’m surprised because Apple has famously (and publicly) argued in the past that touchscreens on laptops were a bad idea. Things can change, of course, but I don’t see anything here that even attempts to invalidates any of the arguments they made against touchscreen laptops at the time, which I still think were pretty compelling.
For example, raising your arm to interact with a screen for any sustained period just doesn’t work ergonomically. In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
It also makes the display look dirty. I expected Apple to pair this with some new coating or display technology that would reduce fingerprints and smudges, etc, but I’m not seeing anything like that either.
Overall I’m surprised Apple would add a whole new interaction model to the MacBook and barely explain why. Given how central UX has always been to Apple (they make a big deal of the mouse, the click wheel and multi-touch, etc.) That feels very... un-Apple.
> In my experience, people who buy touchscreen-enabled laptops quickly loose the habit of using the touchscreen for exactly that reason.
I have not experienced that at all. I see people touch their touch-capable laptop screens all the time.
I don’t understand how people legitimately hold this belief that no one could or would use a laptop touchscreen. This is exactly how millions of people use their tablets every day. You hold it in your lap and you poke the screen. Or you use the stand to prop it up on a table and you poke at the screen. And shockingly, your arm doesn’t fall off.
A macbook with apple pencil support that can be held like a tablet (turn the screen 180 degrees?) would be incredible for digital drawing. Hope to see it in my lifetime.
Back in the day this would have been a “One more thing…” announcement. Apple must be upset with the hardware prices to bury this a late October press release.
"We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out, it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demos. But after a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It's ergonomically terrible."
—Jobs
I am going to jump on the touch hate bandwagon but more specifically I think it’s odd in the format they designed. I think the MSFT surface is brilliant because you can fold it down into an iPad like device which can be great for travel and other non-desk uses.
Touch while still being a normal laptop does feel odd. I would be curious who wants touch in this form factor.
I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
Get a custom-made cloth or use a thin microfiber like a lens cleaning cloth and put it between the keyboard and screen. Whenever you close the computer. Keeps the smudges off and prevents key shaped wear marks in your display.
> The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different
Which is why I think it makes sense for certain things where you can update the experience to be enhanced for touch but not, like, daily email & web browsing. But those things that will do well with touch do seem to align with the creative side of Apple's market - things like manipulating 3D objects, moving audio tracks around, that kind of stuff, if the interface is re-thought for a touch experience then I think there's a lot there.
Certainly there are times, even just basic things like looking at pictures, where I wish I could touch my monitor like it was a tablet.
I don't want to try to tap a link on a desktop rendered website, a mouse is more precise for that kind of thing, but I can imagine a lot of use cases that will improve if you assume that a large subset of your users has some kind of touch device.
I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.
I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
The full spec is significantly more expensive in my local currency (Denmark, DKK) than in USD. Something like $7500 even after sales tax of 25% is added.
Admittedly, Apple has “refused” to do many things over the years (pen support on iPad comes to mind) and yet ends up doing them. Apple refuses to do something until they want to sell it.
FWIW, I don’t understand the appeal of this device at all, but I don’t expect much consistency from Apple.
I really hope the screen no longer has the slow response and ghosting anymore. I'm surprised by the responsive difference every time I use my outdated 2013 MacBook Air's trackpad and immediately feel the difference over my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 daily driver.
> “We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work,” “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off,”
> “It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
“Back to the Mac” event in 2010.
After the unnecessary iOS "glass", touchbar, and now this USD400 'arm-fatigue feature', and other - made soley for the media-money-shot 'features' - Apple is really just in the 'great demo' business and departs even further 'great product' business.
My god they finally did it. After all the fears of canibalizing iPad sales and gorilla arms. An Apple touchscreen MacBook.
Absurd it took this long when they basically led the field in touchscreen innovation (especially on the UX side of things)
I always thought the Surface Book design by Microsoft was very Apple like and it always seemed like the logical step: let the screen detach but keep the extra horsepower in the base.
CPU + battery in the top-cover kills the balance of the laptop and makes the whole thing heavier. It's a really awkward design compared to a clamshell laptop with a very thin display-only lid.
Flip-around convertible or kickstand with soft-cover keyboard both work a lot better, but also both have trade-offs.
I somewhat fondly recall my old HP Windows Pen PC where the screen would twist and lay back down over the keyboard. That thing was a brick, but it had the correct balance for a laptop and the keyboard keys were out of the way in tablet mode. Maybe Apple will bring that form factor back, but with a super thin OLED display and a really lightweight device.
Having said that, I'd be afraid to touch it. On one of my MBPs, I held it by putting my hands near the hinge, with my thumbs resting in the lower corners of the screen. Over (a short period of) time, the protective(?) coating on the screen wore away.
I am on board for touchscreen (and pencil support) for macOS due to my dream of only carrying an iPad Pro for all development; however, I think they’re making the same mistake as the touch bar - touch is only available on the most expensive Mac’s which will ensure they’re niche. Niche options for user input ensure very few apps get updated to use the new user input (foldable phones, I’m speaking about you).
My god they’re really running out ideas in Cupertino. What I need is a screen that gives an electrical shock to anybody that dares to touch it with their filthy fingers.
No cellular which is literally the only thing missing from the macbook pro :(
1. Mini LED is fantastic so the OLED jump is marginal at best
2. I know many people with a touchscreen windows laptop. None of them uses the touch function on a regular basis
My first iPad entirely felt like a waste of money. Any time I'd want to do something useful with it, the mac was a better choice. Not sure what cellular on the iPad would have ever offered me, but I know why I want it on my laptop.
What’s your use case for cellular on a laptop? At least here in Canada data plans are expensive enough that I could blow through my monthly limit in 30min with a laptop. I would be quite annoyed if my wifi dropped and I had discovered only later that I’d exhausted my data unknowingly
If i wanted a touch screen mb air, id get an ipad. i will actively avoid these. apple has been dropping the ball big time lately. ive noticed siri has a 5 second delay on my phone now, making reminder setting not so easy.
Seems like this is essentially a 400$ upgrade for the M6 Pro MacBook Pro. Those 400$ get you better sound, a better display and touch.
This is clearly targeted at creatives, the touchscreen feels more like a nice bonus they give out so people can experiment with touchscreen macOS and polish their apps for it - my guess is that this is preparation for a more convenient touch-based macOS device they're going to launch in a year or so.
Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
IMO, this is a macbook pro but ~200g lighter and with an improved screen that's finally oled. Absolutely NOT worth 2900. An M6 mbp specced to 24GB is $700 cheaper directly on their site. Yeah it's an M6 and not an M5 pro, but I guarantee the performance difference won't matter 99.9% of the time.
$2900 is just ridiculous. So many better options with this budget.
> Better sound is not really a selling point to anyone in the real world.
Have you heard a recent 16" MBPro? They sound great. The Spatial Audio works. Maybe most people don't prioritize it, but it's a real quality of life thing. Same with deep black pixels: you don't know what the experience is worth until you have it. I value it highly.
The screens recently have been very good, but this one is better. Same with the sound. I'm glad it exists because it drives everyone to get better.
Which is why "better than existing macbook pros" isn't a selling point. It's already more than good enough.
The parent comment was saying "better sound" as one of the upgrades you get for the $400, which is a comparison to the currently available macbook pros.
Call me old fashioned, but I think "this one is even better than the last one, and you already liked that one, so imagine how you're gonna enjoy this one", is indeed a selling point. It's one of the most common and enduring selling points.
2000 nits peak screen brightness with nano texture is going to look incredible outdoors. Not sure I'm feeling the need to upgrade yet but glad the brightness+coating combo will continue to be a thing
Hoping for a follow-up convertible touchscreen pen-capable MacBook Air. iPad Pro is just too limiting with iPadOS and it's thicker and heavier than a MacBook Air or any of my convertible Chromebooks.
> Up to 13 more hours than Intel-based MacBook Pro
Even though this reveal seems genuinely cool, this stat sounds weird. Why compare it to Intel Macs when the status quo has been Apple Silicon for half a dozen years?
I always thought if Apple did touch on the macbook it would come with a redesign to merge macOS with touch elements from the iPad. As it stands this feels like more of an afterthought.
If there’s one killer feature though, it’s iOS device mirroring and the iOS simulators. I’ve instinctively reached up to touch the iOS simulator so many times.
I wonder how they do the glowing apple logo with no backlight.
I thought that they would basically replace macbooks with ipad pros. Sort of like microsoft surface, a tablet-laptop combo. Not sure what their plan is now.
Years ago like 2010, 11 Microsoft had demo touchscreen computers running an art application in the Kids Room at the MOMA museum in NYC. It was responsive to actual brushes and was quite an interesting interface. As far as I knew it was a beta.
Not a fan of touchscreen on inclined surfaces, personally. I think the ergonomics of this will be bad for shoulders/elbows.
Like the iPad when it’s docked to its smart keyboard, I don’t like touching it at the point, it’s better to use the trackpad that’s laying flat.
It also wobbles when you do touch it. The macbook may not do the wobble, but it will constantly push further open and this may weaken the hinge mechanism over time.
Does this mean that macOS will natively support touch screens so I don't need to look anymore for after-market solutions[0] for mine? That would be cool.
I’m not sure. macOS has had some degree of support for touch screens internally for a very long time (2010) but required hardware specific drivers.
So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.
Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.
Same, my latency in the home (which is where I spend 99% of my time), even over WiFi, is generally <5ms, which is plenty low enough to stream the desktop to the laptop via Sunshine+Moonlight and even control fast-paced FPS games.
OLED displays now are tandem OLED displays which stack multiple layers. This means you don't need to exponentially crank up the voltage to provide more brightness which also increases lengivity of the panel (and increases battery life).
I have a, what, 2019 LG CX OLED TV. 55". Used in anger as computer monitor since new. With complete disregard for burnout. It's… perfectly fine? I can't see any dimming or patterns or faults at all.
Some of my students use touchscreen Windows laptops. They seem to be OK with them but I never found them usable particularly for coding. A touchscreen laptop has ergonomically bad design. Or it could just be a generational thing.
Aside: Does anyone else find the new AI texture explosions Apple's using on their marketing pages now a little unsettling and un-Apple? I guess I'm desperate for at least one tech brand to feel / remain human.
I see. The iPad and Macbook are converging. Interesting. I can’t say I get the use case but perhaps it will fold in some interesting way that makes it usable. I have no problem using a touchscreen occasionally but in the standard configuration the screen will wobble if you touch it.
Apple's been trying (in vain?) to sell iPad users a Magic Keyboard for six years and add a windowing system to iPadOS to pretend it's a real operating system, so I suppose they're trying to bridge the gap from the opposite (Macbook) side.
Everybody worried about the usefulness of touch (which I do find occasionally useful), meanwhile they've literally set base pricing at $2900. For a 14 inch mbp, with 24GB. Hilarious.
It might not be the right machine for you and that's ok.
If I needed one of these for my work (I don't) and was going to be using it every day for the next two years, I think I could justify it. It would be about $4 / day which is within reach. Add in the fact that Mac's have decent resale value and the daily expense could be quite a bit less.
Why do videos of screens look amazing even when viewed on an inferior monitor? This is not a new observation of mine - even as a child, I'd see fuzzy, snowy commercials for big screen TVs on my 13 inch color TV, and they always looked so much better than the TV I was watching them on.
Funny how half the press release tries to hide the notch/island/whatever its called. I almost thought they gave up on that, then I finally saw it like 7 or 8 images in.
Got the m5 pro like last month. Actually no FOMO this time. I wonder how the AMOLED looks irl, I bet it's sweet but the current pro motion is already top notch.
Doesn't look like it folds back or does tent mode. Those are some good use cases for touchscreen PCs, being able to walk around in tablet mode in something like a warehouse, for example.
Cue the folks who have used nothing but Apple laptops for the past 20 years coming here and wondering who would possibly want a laptop with a touch screen.
I think the confusion is lot of Apple enthusiasts drank the kool-aid the company served them saying touch screen is "yuck". And now they have a touch screen, it takes a while to re-orient themselves.
We saw this with foldables. It was a bad idea, but when Apple did it, it was a great idea all of a sudden.
And if you rewind a while back, you'll see "large phones are bad because one handed use .. blah blah" and then Pro Max.
The fancy OLED display would actually be a potential reason to finally upgrade from my M1 Pro but even if I could afford it, I find prices like that hard to swallow (and I couldn't care less about touch in a laptop fwiw). Guess I'll buy one used in a year or three, maybe.
So unbelievably disappointing, right after the disappointment of the Duo. I was in the market for both, the early reviews of the Duo stopped me from upgrading, and the landing page of this new Mac has stopped me from upgrading that.
1. No cellular? This was honestly one of the biggest selling points in my eyes. The iPhone hotspot has been so unreliable lately.
2. Never would use the touchscreen in software engineering. Agree with others that I don't understand a real use case for it, and apparently their website designers can't either.
3. OLED is nice.
4. 24h battery life is nice.
5. No M6 Pro/Max. Just getting one generation up?
6. Not even a cool name? No Macbook Ultra? Macbook Studio? Obviously not important, but even they couldn't justify it as its own separate product from the existing Pros.
On the bright side, the wallet savings are nice. Absolutely not worth a $4,150 hit (using my M4 Pro 48GB/1TB 16" as reference)
Apple said its skipping M6 for Macbook Pro -- there is no m6 pro/max -- so the next chip MBP will get is m7 in 2027. So I would hold off on buying one until next year. This is essentially a 2025 product refresh.
looks like they brought back the glowing apple logo on the lid for the first time in a decade!
the older macbooks used the display's backlight to illuminate the logo, but since these new OLED displays light up individual pixels I wonder how they're lighting it up now...
Aww dammit I was waiting for a body refresh with M6, but this is still M5…
Why are Apple's new product lines so..self-defeating now? I wanted to get the iPhone Duo but it has worse cameras than my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and now this Mac..
Looks like people who want the best of everything will have to skip this year.
I've noticed this with a lot of products lately. It seems rare for a new release to strictly supersede or maintain performance on all attributes on a successor.
I am pretty sure Steve is rolling in his grave. It's pretty saddening to see Apple losing its vision, what is making MacBook Pro different than other laptops in the market? Apple silicon? Not anymore.
MacOS? Probably, but it's getting worse too.
I have had touch screen laptop (Dell Inspiron), and boy, it was such a horrible and useless feature. Screen is always greasier than gas-station hot dog.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure their stock is headed for a new ATH.
This is disappointing, I was hoping they were going to do something interesting with the display hinge to make it make sense as a touch interface. Can’t see it being useful as is.
Please tell me the rounded corners at the bottom of the screen are just for the effect and they aren't actually physically like that. This would be worse than the current notch, you can even see them clipping the text in the LM Studio picture.
Touch screen on a laptop is objectively disgusting. I have a Lenovo yoga X1 or something with a touch screen (and it folds backwards into a tablet) hence the name. It is stupid and useless. I can imagine Steve Jobs turning in his grave right now.
If you want a screen to touch get a fucking tablet.
Touch screens are dead, no one ever said good things about them. Also, I think the best setup now (regardless macos or linux) is having your heavy lifting compute at home and you use something like macbook air and ssh into it, that way you get the best portability and also you are secure if your laptop is lost.
If the screen were detachable and you get a giant 16'' ipad, I would consider it. I do not want touch interface on a laptop and will never buy this. I do want non-touch OLED screen though.
Dynamic island sounds like it will be huge distraction if animations will play there.
The product itself is fine, I have no strong opinions on it. But what a hell of a disappointing unveiling.
Take down the store and website for a few minutes, boot it back up, boom. That's it. They couldn't even bother with a keynote or a livestream or something.
For their flagship laptop receiving a substantial update after six years. Okay.
Makes sense this event is in LA- this this is designed to be a mobile media creation device. Most users don't care about most of the features that are highlighted in the press release, but someone creating any sort of visual media would.
Historically speaking, the Pro/Max versions of the chips have become available at around the same time the next-generation base chip does. So, M4 Pro/Max shipped when M5 shipped, M5 Pro/Max shipped when M6 shipped, and so forth.
The M7 generation is said to be another huge advance on local LLM performance, so Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and M6 Max to bring out the M7 generation early.
* For the 14-inch: 3.5 lb (1.59 kg) -> 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
* For the 16-inch: 4.7 lb (2.13 kg) -> 4.0 lb (1.81 kg)
About 15% lighter on both models. Switching from LCD to OLED saves weight because the screen does not need a backlight and has fewer layers. They also made the laptop thinner by nearly 1 mm. But that's not enough to push the weight down by 300 grams. They must have redesigned internal components to cut weight as well.
There must have been a dedicated effort to reduce weight. Kudos to the MacBook Pro team!