Apple’s new touchscreen MacBook Pro opens at $2,899 and climbs to roughly $14,549, a spread of more than $11,600 inside a single product family. The low figure belongs to the 14-inch model with an M5 Pro chip. The high figure belongs to the 16-inch model with an M5 Max chip once every storage, memory and glass upgrade is ticked.
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Apple announced the PROLED XDR laptops on Oct. 28, and the company says they reach customers on Nov. 6. Between those two numbers sit four official starting prices, three storage steps that cost real money, and one total that does not quite add up when the individual upgrade prices are summed.
Four launch prices, from the 14-inch M5 Pro to the 16-inch M5 Max
Apple’s own newsroom release lists the U.S. starting prices: the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro costs $2,899, the 16-inch M5 Pro costs $3,399, the 14-inch M5 Max costs $4,499 and the 16-inch M5 Max costs $4,799. Education buyers pay less, with the entry model listed at $2,749. Apple’s shop pages did not return option pricing when fetched for this article, so every upgrade figure below comes from tech-press reporting on the configurator rather than from a page Apple published.
The entry price is the one most buyers will meet first. TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta reported the same $2,899 and $3,399 starting points and set them against a separate, non-touch 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip, announced a day earlier at $1,999. According to MacRumors, each starting price rose $400 from the model it replaces, which works out to about 16 percent on the 14-inch M5 Pro and about 9 percent on the 16-inch M5 Max, measured against prices in place just before the announcement.
The $14,549 configuration, one option at a time
The ceiling comes from the 16-inch M5 Max with the 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU option, 128GB of unified memory, a 16TB SSD and nano-texture glass. MacRumors, working from Apple’s configurator, calculated that the fully loaded 16-inch model costs $14,549, and 9to5Mac independently framed the whole MacBook Pro line as running from $1,999 to $14,549. The 14-inch model with the same chip and options tops out lower, at $14,249.
Storage is where the money goes. MacRumors itemizes the jump from the 2TB base drive to 4TB at $1,000, to 8TB at $3,000 and to 16TB at $7,000. Moving memory up to 128GB adds $2,000, and the nano-texture glass adds $150. The 16TB drive alone accounts for nearly half of the distance between the $4,799 starting price and the maximum.
MacRumors also noted that the previous 16-inch M5 Max, in a 128GB, 8TB, nano-texture build, topped out at $10,149. The same 8TB build on the new model costs $10,549, a $400 increase, and the extra $4,000 or so at the very top is mostly the doubled storage.
A total that does not fully reconcile
The itemized upgrades do not fully explain the $14,549 figure. Starting from the $4,799 base and adding $7,000 for storage, $2,000 for memory and $150 for glass gives $13,949, which leaves about $600 unaccounted for. The 14-inch model shows the same pattern: $4,499 plus the same three upgrades is $13,649, against a stated maximum of $14,249, a gap of the same size.
The memory wording adds a second wrinkle. MacRumors describes the $2,000 upgrade as moving “from 48GB to 128GB,” while giving 36GB as the starting memory for M5 Max models, which matches Apple’s own listing. A 48GB step in the configurator would explain a separate charge somewhere along the way, but no source read for this article says so. The $14,549 total is therefore a press-reported configurator figure, not a number Apple states, and the missing $600 is not something any reachable page accounts for.
The touch display and the dates Apple gives
Apple calls the new machine the first touchscreen Mac. Its newsroom release says the touch sensor is built into the display panel, that a redesigned hinge steadies the screen during touch use, and that macOS translates touches into clicks so many existing apps work. Apple’s MacBook Pro product page lists a touch display on the PROLED XDR models and marks it not applicable on the Liquid Retina XDR version.
Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, said in the release that “PROLED XDR is the world’s best laptop display,” and argued that Touch paired with M5 Pro and M5 Max gives professionals a new way to work. Apple lists up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio and up to 24 hours of battery life, with the battery figure based on Apple’s own September 2026 testing. No independent benchmark or review data was available when this article was written.
One date conflict remains. Apple says preorders opened Oct. 28, while TechCrunch reported they begin Oct. 30. Both agree on Nov. 6 for availability. Apple’s own account is used here, and the open question is how many buyers will pay the 16TB premium once the missing $600 is explained.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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