Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Apple has finally brought touchscreen support to the MacBook Pro, ending its long-standing resistance to adding touch controls to its laptops. Announced at the company’s “Pro and tell” event on Wednesday, the new MacBook Pro features an OLED display, support for touch gestures and Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max processors. The laptop also gets a redesigned interface and a lighter build.
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In India, the new MacBook Pro is priced at Rs 3,49,900 for the 14-inch model and Rs 4,09,900 for the 16-inch variant. The laptop is scheduled to be available from November 9.
Apple MacBook Pro: What’s new
The touchscreen is the biggest change to Apple’s professional laptop. Users can scroll through documents, zoom into images, draw on the display and annotate content directly on the screen. Apple says the feature will also benefit professional workflows, allowing designers to interact with 3D models and music producers to adjust controls using their fingers.
Apple has redesigned the interface to make touch interactions more natural while retaining the traditional keyboard and trackpad experience. The new MacBook Pro also introduces Dynamic Island, bringing a familiar iPhone feature to the Mac. It provides access to Spotlight search, Live Activities, music controls and other information from the top of the screen.
The laptop uses a tandem OLED display, which Apple calls PROLED XDR. It promises deeper blacks, stronger contrast and improved colour accuracy. The display supports a refresh rate of up to 120Hz through ProMotion, with peak brightness reaching 2,000 nits for HDR content. Apple is also offering a nano-texture option to reduce reflections.
The new models are powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which are designed for demanding tasks such as video editing, 3D rendering, software development and AI workloads. Apple says the processors include Neural Accelerators in their GPU cores to speed up AI-related tasks. Storage configurations go up to 16TB, with the company claiming up to twice the storage speed.
Other upgrades include a redesigned thermal system, an improved six-speaker audio setup, a studio-quality three-microphone array and support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The laptop retains ports such as HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack, alongside three Thunderbolt 5 ports.
Apple claims the new MacBook Pro offers up to 24 hours of battery life and can charge to 50 per cent in 30 minutes. The redesigned models are also lighter than their predecessors.
A major change in Apple’s laptop strategy
Apple’s decision is notable because the company has resisted touchscreen Macs for years. In 2010, Steve Jobs described touchscreen laptops as “ergonomically terrible”. Two years later, former CEO Tim Cook argued against combining tablets and laptops, comparing the idea to converging a toaster and a refrigerator.
Apple later experimented with the Touch Bar, a touch-sensitive strip that replaced the function keys on MacBook Pro models introduced in 2016. However, the company brought back physical function keys in its 2021 redesign and discontinued the Touch Bar in 2023.
The new MacBook Pro represents a significant change in that approach, bringing direct touch interaction to Apple’s flagship laptop while keeping its established keyboard-and-trackpad controls.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
