After years of Apple (and Steve Jobs) insisting touchscreens were “ergonomically terrible” for laptops, the company has finally released its first touchscreen MacBook Pro—the PROLED XDR model. In this hands-on review, the biggest surprise isn’t the touch feature itself (useful but not transformative), but the dazzling tandem OLED display, lighter design, and other refinements that make Apple’s pro laptop a significant leap forward.
Andrew Griffin for The Independent:
[U]sing a touchscreen Mac is not quite the transformative, dramatic change that anyone might have expected. And that it might not even be the most exciting thing about the new laptop, anyway…
For now, the touchscreen remains very much a secondary interface of the MacBook, and perhaps a secondary feature of the computer in general. That does not mean that it is not useful or delightful, only that I have come to think of it in the same way as you might any other kind of extra way of interacting with a computer, such as a music keyboard or drawing stylus: a great form of control that both makes existing things easier and adds whole new kinds of expression, but not the primary way of doing anything…
There’s a good reason that Apple doesn’t mention touch in the name of this computer, and that it largely downplayed the feature in contrast with the excited commentary that surrounded the launch of the device. It turns out that the screen is a delight – and would be more than enough to recommend the new MacBook Pro, even if you couldn’t touch it.
Apple has not only introduced OLED to the line-up – itself exciting, given how much better those screens are – but used the technology to build the best laptop display I have ever seen. It is an astonishing, dazzling, stunning achievement, sometimes literally.
The luminosity of the display is such that it can, if you want it to, be a little too much: it shines while watching HDR content, and can sustain 2,000 nits of brightness, bringing pictures of the outdoors to life, for instance. It’s the first laptop I haven’t habitually cranked up to full brightness when working in the office, and having the additional light is not only useful for the detailed professional work that might require it but also a generally handy thing to have for working in light situations.
And it can go refreshingly dark, too, with a shocking 10 million to 1 contrast ratio that means that everything looks crisp and precise. Watching films or looking through photos is beautifully clear, allowing bright sections to shine and dark ones to be precisely black, with the two areas not interfering with each other at all.
Colour is also rich and vivid, adding to the feeling that you could happily fall through this computer and into a kind of technicolour wonder. That not only makes for vibrant experiences whatever kind of content you are looking at, but means that it is the first of Apple’s laptop displays that can be called reference-calibre, allowing it to be used in professional situations such as filmmaking, design and medical imaging.
Taken together, it makes Apple’s claims that the PROLED XDR is the “world’s best laptop display” feel a little humble. Of course it is: it’s a display so vivid, bright and crisp that it totally transforms the experience of using a laptop, suffusing it with a kind of rich delight that is hard to forget, or to come back from.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s tons more in Griffin’s full review – recommended – here.
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I mean…they weren’t wrong. I would not feel comfortable one bit touch the screen of my MacBook. It just doesn’t seem right. I’d hate to turn my bela ekrano into a smudgy mess. Too each their own, but I can’t do this.