Apple Unveils Touchscreen MacBook Pro at 'Pro and Tell' Event After a Week of Hardware Launches

Apple wrapped up a week of product announcements on Wednesday with a "Pro and Tell" event, where it introduced its long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro. The company also rolled out an OLED iPad Mini, Macs with its new M6 chip and AI features for several of its apps in the days before the event.

Apple CEO John Ternus presented the first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, which supports gestures such as scrolling, swiping and pinching. Apple says the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel rather than layered on top, a design meant to reduce latency. The laptop uses a tandem OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 2,000 nits of brightness.

The new model is lighter than earlier MacBook Pro generations, with the 14-inch version weighing three pounds. It brings back an illuminated Apple logo on the lid and is the first MacBook Pro with a Dynamic Island, which shows real-time updates, searches for files and works with Siri AI. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model with an M5 Pro chip, and the 16-inch version starts at $3,399, also with an M5 Pro. Configurations with an M5 Max chip are available too. Preorders open Wednesday, with availability starting November 6.

Earlier in the week, Apple updated the iPad Mini with a larger 8.5-inch OLED display. The tablet is 5.4mm thick, and its bezels are 24 percent slimmer than on the previous generation. It debuts what Apple calls an "Acoustic Display," which the company says pairs woofers with the display to deliver better bass and more volume.

The iPad Mini also gets the more powerful A20 Pro chip, a 12-megapixel camera in landscape orientation and an IP67 rating for water and dust protection. It starts at $699 for the Wi-Fi only model with 128GB of storage and comes in midnight and starlight. A glare-reducing nano-texture display is offered with the pricier 256GB and 512GB configurations.

Apple also refreshed the standard 14-inch MacBook Pro with its M6 chip and its in-house N1 networking chip, which adds Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support. The laptop has three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports that support charging and DisplayPort, along with MagSafe 3, HDMI and an SDXC card slot. As with its predecessor, it offers a Liquid Retina XDR display with a nano-texture option and a 12MP Center Stage camera. Pricing starts at $1,999 with a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage, and shipping begins November 6.

The iMac lineup also moves to the M6 chip, which Apple says delivers up to 5x faster on-device AI performance than the M4-powered iMac. It includes the N1 wireless chip as well. The design, color options and port selection, which tops out at four Thunderbolt ports, are largely unchanged. The M6 iMac starts at $1,499 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. Preorders are open, and availability starts November 6.

On the software side, Apple is adding an AI chatbot to Keynote, Numbers and Pages that it says understands the context of the document a user is working on. The chatbot is built on models from Apple and OpenAI. It can design and animate slides in Keynote, create and restructure drafts in Pages, and calculate and visualize data in Numbers.

Apple is also bringing an AI-powered fill feature to Pixelmator Pro, a new AI assistant to Logic Pro and direct access to MotionVFX in Final Cut Pro.