The first reviews of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with PROLED XDR displays have been published ahead of the laptops launching on Friday. One of the key new features is a touchscreen. Is it worth it, though? Here’s what reviews say. The Verge ‘s David Pierce said that, in his testing so far, touch input has not been something that "meaningfully changes the laptop experience." He recommends the new MacBook Pro models regardless for the OLED display and other upgrades. Pierce did mention some examples where touch proved useful: That’s not to say the touchscreen doesn’t come in handy, though. It does more often than I expected. When I’m editing photos, reaching out and spreading my fingers to zoom in on the section I want to see is vastly easier than clicking and dragging with the trackpad. When I’m watching a movie, I can just tap the video rather than wiggling the mouse to find the cursor. My favorite touch use so far has been when I’m showing somebody something on my computer — now we can both swipe between options or tap to make an edit rather than having to crowd around the trackpad. He also pointed out a few limitations: There’s no onscreen keyboard that appears when you tap a text box; you don’t get the copy / paste / select all pop-up when you tap on words. No radius of tools appears when you tap the Apple Pencil on the screen in Procreate, because, oh wait, the Apple Pencil doesn’t work at all. Gizmodo ‘s Kyle Barr said touch input is beneficial for the iPhone Mirroring feature on the Mac: The touchscreen is occasionally useful. It’s not the end-all-be-all. But it sure is handy. If you’re one to use the iPhone mirroring feature on MacBook Pro, the touchscreen makes it more intuitive. Instead of having to click on the bottom bar to minimize an app, you can simply swipe up from the bottom of the mirrored iPhone, like normal. Using the touchscreen on the mirrored iPhone isn’t as snappy as the real deal. It’s obvious though that Apple has been working towards this touchscreen design for a while, as more and more macOS features start to make better sense with the touchscreen in tow. WIRED ‘s Luke Larsen often forgot about the touchscreen, but he too pointed out a few examples where it proved to be useful in his testing: In the time I’ve had with the touchscreen MacBook Pro so far, I tried to remind myself of its new powers. But when I’m deep in work, I completely forget the touchscreen. It just has no place in my workflows. That doesn’t mean it’s not ever useful, though. Sometimes, swiping away a notification with a finger feels intuitive. Or if you’re lounging on the couch and use your thumb to scroll through your Instagram feed as you would on an iPad, it works. But those times are few and far between. I’m certainly not going to be poking three fingers up at the screen to swipe between Spaces when I could do that on a trackpad without even lifting my hand. With an OLED display, the new MacBook Pro models deliver more vivid colors and increased contrast ratio compared to the previous models with mini-LED displays. The laptops also achieve up to 2,000 nits of brightness for HDR content. OLED displays do not have a backlight, and individual pixels turn off completely for the color black. Bloomberg ‘s Chris Welch said the OLED display is "genuinely striking": The new MacBook Pro’s dual-layer tandem OLED panel is genuinely striking and can get noticeably brighter than LCD models. Since each pixel is individually controlled and can fully shut off for dark content, this screen provides meaningfully superior contrast compared with the Mini LED models, which were already impressive in their own right. Any concerns I had about display uniformity, which can be an issue with some OLED devices, quickly vanished once I began using the machine. From corner to corner, the 16. 3-inch panel is punchy, vibrant and can display an even wider range of colors than before — a win for photographers. Mashable ‘s Timothy Beck Werth said the OLED display "absolutely slaps": This laptop absolutely slaps, and the incredible PROLED XDR display is the headline. It’s stunning…