Apple has unveiled its first OLED MacBook Pro laptops , and that means we’ve got a new bit of display branding: PROLED XDR. You can have the laptop in 14-inch or 16-inch variants, pre-orders are open now for shipping on or after the 6th of November — and we’ve gone hands-on with them. Literally, because they’re also the first touchscreen Macs. The name ‘PROLED XDR’ is a new piece of jargon that Apple’s debuting with this machine. So what actually is it? The short answer is that it’s a ‘Tandem OLED’ panel, which means that it uses multiple layers of organic light-emitting diodes — in this case, two layers. Two OLED layers are better than one because the result is considerably brighter than a single-layer OLED: you literally have two OLEDs firing per pixel. It also boosts longevity, because each of the two layers doesn’t have to work as hard, so they have a longer lifespan and are more likely to avoid burn-in. Apple has stayed away from OLED for its MacBook Pro displays in the past, and clearly that’s changed. According to Apple that’s because PROLED XDR "finally" overcomes the traditional limitations of OLED: low and variable brightness, off-axis color shift and the risk of burn-in from displaying the same interface elements, such as toolbars and palettes, whenever the screen is on. The confusing thing, however, is that this isn’t Apple’s first use of Tandem OLED. It used the technology in its shift to OLED in the iPad Pro , but those aren’t branded as PROLED XDR. Those are called ‘Ultra Retina XDR’ displays. So let’s look at the performance differences listed by Apple that put the ‘pro’ in PROLED. (Image credit: Apple) What’s so special about PROLED XDR displays
The Tandem OLED inside the new MacBook Pros is very bright, delivering up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness (ie, in a small area of the screen for a short time) and up to 1,000 nits of sustained fullscreen brightness (ie, across the entire screen at once, without having to dim quickly). The iPad Pro (2025) ‘s display is also capable of 1,000 nits of fullscreen brightness, but has a rated peak brightness of 1,600 nits — so the MacBook Pro is 25% brighter. That will bring a nice extra boost to clarity in bright HDR scenes, but won’t make a huge difference really — the fullscreen brightness is the most important factor, and that’s the same on both. Because it’s OLED, it gives you the blackest of black tones — there’s no backlight to leak light into areas it shouldn’t go — and a very high contrast ratio, in this case 10,000,000:1…