We’re just a week away from the official announcement of the first ever touchscreen Mac. The upcoming MacBook Pro will also have an OLED screen, which may include a Dynamic Island, and is said to be lighter.
We don’t yet know the price of the new model, but we can be sure it will carry a significant premium over the existing one. My guess would be somewhere in the $500 to $700 range …
There’s so far been a fair degree of excitement about an OLED Mac. In some ways that’s certainly justified given the quality of the OLED screens we’ve seen on the iPad Pro. On the other hand, Apple’s IPS LCD panels with mini-LED backlighting have always looked fantastic, and I would say rival many competing OLED screens. For that reason, I’m expecting the improvement in display quality to be rather modest.
I’ve seen way less interest in the touchscreen. While there is certainly a segment of Apple fans who are eagerly awaiting it, the majority view seems to be that it will have limited utility and be a fingerprint magnet. My own experience of using a 12.9in iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard as a pseudo laptop is that I used the trackpad for everything except scrolling, so I don’t personally see much appeal in a touchscreen Mac.
A lighter MacBook is always welcome, of course, and if the weight difference is significant, that may be a reason to consider it. But unless it’s going to get somewhere close to the weight of a MacBook Air, it’s perhaps not worth such a substantial premium.
Assuming I’m right about the price premium, you’ll be paying somewhere in the region of $600 more for the new machine. For that much, you could double the RAM or double the size of your SSD when buying the existing model. Which would you consider the better deal?
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