Apple Prices Fully Loaded Touchscreen MacBook Pro at $14,549
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Apple announced on Wednesday its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and an OLED display, a machine whose top configuration costs $14,549 — the most expensive MacBook ever listed — and whose pricing turns on the global shortage of memory chips.
The laptop, shown at Apple’s “Pro and Tell” event, comes in 14-inch and 16-inch models with the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and a display Apple calls PROLED XDR. Base prices are $2,899 and $3,399. The touch layer supports pinch, scroll and drawing gestures; Apple pitched it for manipulating 3D models, playing virtual instruments and annotating documents, and for designers and developers testing touch interfaces. Orders opened the same day, initially through Apple’s own store.
The headline figure is the fully loaded build. With the M5 Max chip — an 18-core processor and 40-core graphics — 128GB of memory, 16TB of storage and nano-texture glass, the 16-inch model reaches $14,549 and the 14-inch $14,249, The Verge reported. The 16TB storage option alone adds $7,000, roughly doubling the machine’s price; the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro topped out at $10,149. Choosing 8TB instead brings the total to $10,549, still $400 above the predecessor’s ceiling.
CNET attributed the jump in part to the AI-fueled spike in the price of RAM and solid-state storage. “It’s so expensive because 16TB drives cost a fortune, as does 128GB, and professionals have been paying those workstation prices for years,” senior editor Lori Grunin said. For the money, she added, “I’d expect the M5 Ultra chip. But I don’t think they can put the Ultra in a laptop yet.”
Neither memory nor storage can be upgraded after purchase, which pushes professional buyers toward the costly configurations at the point of order. CNET’s Joshua Goldman said such machines are bought mostly by companies, startups and institutions — engineering firms, film post-production houses, data-science teams — “people who don’t have to pay for it” personally. For context, he noted, a comparable Dell Precision workstation can be configured past $18,000.
Reviewers who handled the machine ahead of sale found the OLED display and the thinner chassis well executed. The open question is volume: most of the new touch-enabled MacBook Pros are expected to sell at the still-steep but more familiar prices near the base models.