After what feels like years of speculation, and even despite Steve Jobs having rejected the idea, Apple has unveiled its first ever touchscreen MacBook.
The touchscreen is found on the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, but what is this screen technology? Alongside its touchscreen, are there other technologies found within the screen that could sway you to choose that MacBook?
We explain everything we know about Apple’s PROLED XDR Display below. For more on Apple’s recent launch, visit our MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display vs MacBook Pro comparison.
Otherwise, our round-up of the best laptops reveals the top-rated devices from the past year.
What is PROLED XDR Display?
Apple’s PROLED XDR Display promises to offer a “visual experience unlike any other” and is hailed by the brand as being the “world’s best laptop display”.
At its core, the PROLED XDR Display uses tandem OLED technology, which is two stacked electroluminescent-emitting layers, though Apple claims this is “unlike any other”. Firstly, the display promises to sport “deep innovations in its layers” that keeps brightness and grayscale uniform across the full screen while minimising internal reflections – something that’s common in traditional OLEDs.
This is backed by advanced algorithms in the display engines of the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that control the colour and luminances of every pixel at a sub-millisecond level, for brightness uniformity and accuracy, regardless of whether the display is at its highest or lowest brightness levels. Alongside pixel calibration, the display engine also works to reduce long-term burn-in by monitoring each pixel’s usage, smooth content transitions and improve low-light performance too. Finally, the display engine monitors and adapts each pixel’s usage to preserve image quality too.
The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the first to offer a super-wide colour gamut with both P3 and Adobe RGB, along with wider coverage in green and cyan ranges too. Aided by cutting-edge factory calibration that ensures luminance, white point and the colour gamut are aligned, Apple claims the result is more than 80% Rec. 2020 coverage for HDR video editing and colour grading.
The PROLED XDR also promises up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, plus thanks to optimisations within the tandem OLED panel, custom compensation techniques combined with control of light, the display achieves an industry-leading 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio too. Finally, the display uses a state-of-the-art factory calibration process to deliver Extreme Dynamic Range (XDR).
PROLED XDR Display viewing angles
In addition to its premium technologies, the PROLED XDR display promises a wider high-fidelity viewing angle than LCD alternatives, and can reach 89° left, right, up and down. Apple explains that this is enabled by the OLED’s self-emissive pixels which remove the dependency on limiting liquid crystals, along with a panel architecture that’s designed to control off-axis colour behaviour too. That’s important, as off-axis viewing can distort colour and content.
New MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display
So, not only does the newly announced MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display sport the above screen technologies, but it is also the first Mac with a touchscreen. Crafted specifically for Mac, the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel, and isn’t layered on top of it, which helps to reduce latency and make the use of touch feel more intuitive and natural.