Apple adds touch and OLED to the MacBook Pro

Apple split the MacBook Pro in two this week: a new model with a touchscreen and an OLED panel, and a 14-inch model with the M6 chip. Pre-orders opened on 28 October, with deliveries from 6 November in the countries and regions Apple names, including the US, and neither press release gives a European price. Valve’s SteamOS 3.9.5 is the other release worth a look, mostly for owners of handheld PCs.

We favour

MacBook Pro gains a touchscreen and a tandem OLED display

Apple’s MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the first Mac with touch. Apple says the touch sensor sits inside the display panel instead of on top of it, and that the tandem OLED panel reaches up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness with a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It comes in 14- and 16-inch sizes with an M5 Pro or M5 Max chip, up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 16TB of storage. Apple lists three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot and MagSafe, and says the 14-inch model is half a pound lighter than before at 3 pounds, while the 16-inch is 0.7 pounds lighter at 4 pounds.

Pre-orders opened on 28 October in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries from 6 November. The release only gives US prices, starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch with M5 Pro; Apple has not given European pricing.

Source: Apple

Why we favour it: Touch is a first for the Mac, and Apple builds the sensor into the panel itself. The screen also reaches up to 2000 nits peak HDR brightness against up to 1600 nits peak HDR brightness on the 14-inch M6 model, and it adds Adobe RGB coverage next to P3. The US starting price is high, so until European prices appear this is a choice for colour-critical work, not for everyone.

14-inch MacBook Pro gets the M6 chip

The cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro keeps its Liquid Retina XDR display, which Apple rates at up to 1600 nits of peak HDR brightness, and moves to M6. Apple says the 12-core CPU has two more cores than before and that the 12-core GPU is up to 30 percent faster in graphics and up to 25 percent faster in AI workloads than M5. Memory starts at 16GB, configurable up to 32GB. New are Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 alongside the M6 chip; the three Thunderbolt 4 ports are among the features Apple lists as already on the model. The maker claims up to 24 hours of battery life.

It can be pre-ordered in 35 countries and regions and arrives on 6 November in space black and silver. The US price is $1,999, or $1,899 with education savings; there is no European price yet. Apple’s footnotes say Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, and list English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish for the macOS 27.2 beta, so European buyers should check which Siri features reach them. The gap between the two US starting prices, $1,999 and $2,899, shows how far apart Apple now places the two lines.

Source: Apple

SteamOS 3.9.5 reaches all users

Valve has released SteamOS 3.9.5 as a stable update. The notes cover everything since SteamOS 3.8: the Desktop Mode moves from Plasma 6.4.3 to Plasma 6.7.3, and the Linux kernel is rebased on Linux 7.2. Valve lists lower idle power use on the Steam Deck when no audio is playing, a fix for a crash when launching Forza Horizon 6 on the Legion Go 2, and preliminary brightness control for that handheld. It also fixes games such as ELDEN RING and DARK SOULS III that failed to run on recent Panther Lake Intel CPUs.

Hibernation support is preliminary: Valve says it is not yet in the Game Mode interface and not enabled on the Steam Deck because of a driver bug. For anyone running SteamOS on a non-Valve handheld, the Legion Go 2 and Panther Lake fixes are the part to read first.

Source: Valve