I touched a MacBook – but it was a quiet design change that surprised me

When Apple first unveiled the new MacBook Pros with PROLED XDR Display, I was among the many people wondering whether a touchscreen was something I'd ever missed on my existing (and much loved) MacBook Pro.

Now that I've had a chance to use one for a decent chunk of time, I'm left conflicted, because Apple's nailed so much of the touchscreen experience, without necessarily solving that one core hesitation.

We'll have a full review of the touchscreen MacBook Pros soon, but for now I'm going off a hands-on event in London, where I was able to sit with the MacBook Pro for around 45 minutes in total and experiment with how its touchscreen feels to use.

The short version is that it feels pretty great, full of impressively designed touch interactions – but also with plenty of little hiccups that are probably keeping Apple grounded.

I've tested a huge heap of Windows laptops with touchscreens over the years, and the recent wave of Googlebook launches also all have the capability, and in every case I've found the same pattern. I'll swipe and tap a little in the setup process, because it can be easy to do so, but then once I'm in regular use I'll fall out of the habit and eventually barely use touch at all.

That's the big hurdle facing the touchscreen MacBook, and it can't really mitigate it. After all, how much you use the touchscreen is up to you. What it does do very well is replicate the gesture-based slickness that you get from a Mac's trackpad.

Swiping between desktops and around apps is really responsive and smooth, and that goes a long way towards making you want to do it more. Whether it's ever truly more efficient than using your pointer is a bit of a debate, though, and while some apps like Photoshop and Illustrator can show how brushwork benefits from your fingers, the absence of Apple Pencil support only looks weirder in their context (where it would be a further upgrade).

When people first got to touch these laptops at Apple's launch event, some clips surfaced of the way Apple has adapted its famously small window buttons (to close, minimise or maximise a window) to touch. Now, touching in that area expands the buttons to make them bigger, so you can select one with more precision.

It's a great example of an adaptation that's really neat, but also where the limits of touchscreen interaction bite. Even in a short while with the laptop, I found these buttons weren't always easy to select, or that I'd sometimes tap out of a window by being a couple of millimetres out (or I'd tap into a menu above it), all of which never happens using a mouse or trackpad.

What's more definitely positive is the actual screen's performance. It's a genuine beauty, the OLED panel bringing a depth and darkness to blacks that you can't really match elsewhere, and while the touch part might be an optional extra in my head, the basic screen upgrade is stunning.

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The surprise that I hinted at in this piece's headline, though, didn't come from the screen or its touch capabilities. Rather, it was just how impactful the shaved-off weight that Apple has managed to achieve can be.

I brought my personal M3 MacBook Pro to the hands-on to compare it to, and hefting them both side-by-side, the loss of around 300g of weight between generations is really quite significant. On the one hand, you might not notice it explicitly when it's in a great EDC tech backpack, but everything adds up, and it makes a genuine difference.

Apple didn't necessarily shout that much about this change, beyond quickly highlighting it in the press release for the laptop's unveiling, but I think it's the single factor that I'd notice the most if I had it for a month or so.

That said, we should be getting our hands on the 2026 MacBook Pro very soon for a proper, detailed review, so stay tuned, and we'll see how it holds up to sustained testing, with touchscreen and all.