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IrelandMarques Brownlee would upgrade for weight before a touchscreen
His MacBook Pro hands-on finds thoughtful touch controls and one useful developer feature, but little reason to abandon the trackpad.
Marques Brownlee
Story of No. 12 on the daily chartNo. 2 on the Tech chart
Why this story? One of the most watched videos since yesterday, with 7,305,207 views.
Macbook PROLED XDR Impressions: They Said They Wouldn't!
Things we can learn from the video
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- 0:00Archival Steve Jobs footage sets out the ergonomic objection to vertical touchscreens.
- 1:53Brownlee examines reduced weight, revised cooling and the Dynamic Island replacing the notch.
- 3:00The returning illuminated Apple logo adjusts its brightness to match the display.
- 5:11macOS adapts for fingers with touch gestures, window-snapping controls and enlarged window buttons.
- 7:01The touchscreen MacBook Pro does not support Apple Pencil.
- 8:01Touching an iOS simulator in Xcode offers a practical use case for app developers.
"I'd upgrade for the weight savings before I would for the touchscreen," Marques Brownlee says of Apple's new MacBook Pro. For a laptop whose headline feature reverses a longstanding Apple position, that is a telling first impression.
His hands-on has drawn roughly 7.3 million views since going up today. It opens with archival footage of Steve Jobs explaining why reaching toward a vertical screen becomes uncomfortable, then asks whether Apple's new hardware and software meaningfully answer that objection.
Brownlee demonstrates the accommodations: macOS makes its small window-control buttons larger for fingers, supports touch gestures and offers window-snapping controls. But he remains skeptical about the everyday benefit. Testing an iPhone app in Xcode's iOS simulator provides a concrete exception: developers can touch the simulated phone interface directly.
What Apple has not made is a Mac that folds into an iPad. There is no Apple Pencil support, either. That distinction also runs through the comments, where viewers who wanted a touchscreen describe wanting a fold-flat or fully rotating screen, while longtime Mac users question whether they would reach past an already capable trackpad.
The rest of the machine gives Brownlee more to consider than touch alone: a lighter chassis, revised cooling, a tandem OLED display and a Dynamic Island replacing the notch. The glowing Apple logo returns, too, with brightness that follows the screen. One of the most-liked comments singles out that illuminated lid as more exciting than the touchscreen, neatly echoing a review in which the headline feature is not necessarily the strongest reason to upgrade.
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- Channel
- Marques Brownlee
- Subscribers
- 21,400,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 27,173,200
- Channel views, pace per day
- 4,040,103 (on a normal day: 4,308,097)
- Video published
- October 29, 2026
- Video views so far
- 257,041 (less than a day online)
The numbers
The new MacBook Pro hands-on has reached a large audience in its opening hours. The view total below covers its time online, not a full day.
💡 Test your knowledge
Which development tool supplies Brownlee's practical example of touchscreen use?
Brownlee points to directly touching an app running in Xcode's iOS simulator.