What is the technology inside the touchscreen MacBook Pro’s ‘PROLED XDR’ display? Here’s why the ‘tandem’ OLED panel is important
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Apple has introduced its first OLED MacBook Pro laptops, and that means we have a new display brand: PROLED XDR. You can have the laptop in 14-inch or 16-inch variants, pre-orders are now open for shipping starting November 6, and we’ve put them through their paces. Literally, because they are also the first Macs with a touch screen.
The name ‘PROLED XDR’ is new jargon that Apple is debuting with this machine. So what is it really?
The short answer is that it is a ‘tandem OLED’ panel, meaning 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 increases longevity, because each of the two layers does not have to work as hard, so they have a longer lifespan and are more likely to avoid burning.
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Apple has stayed away from OLED for its MacBook Pro displays in the past and that has clearly changed. According to Apple, this is because PROLED
What’s confusing, however, is that this isn’t Apple’s first use of Tandem OLED. They used the technology in their switch to OLED on the iPad Pro, but they don’t have the PROLED XDR branding. They are called ‘Ultra Retina XDR’ displays.
So let’s look at the performance differences listed by Apple that put the ‘pro’ in PROLED.
What is special about PROLED XDR screens?
The Tandem OLED inside the new MacBook Pros is very bright, offering up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness (i.e. on a small area of the screen for a short time) and up to 1,000 nits of sustained full-screen brightness (i.e. across the entire screen at once, without having to dim quickly).
The iPad Pro (2025) display is also rated at 1000 nits of full-screen brightness, but has a rated maximum brightness of 1600 nits, making the MacBook Pro 25% brighter. This will give a nice extra boost to clarity in bright HDR scenes, but it won’t really make much of a difference – full screen brightness is the most important factor, and it’s the same on both.
Because it’s OLED, it gives you the blackest black tones (there’s no backlight leaking light into areas where it shouldn’t go) and a very high contrast ratio, in this case 10,000,000:1. Again, that’s an interesting difference from the iPad Pro, which has a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
Why a 5 times difference if the brightness is only 25% different? Apple hasn’t said it explicitly, but it should lower the lowest level of brightness that can be measured on the screen. Doing the math on the iPad’s 1,600 nit display with a 2,000,000:1 ratio gives us a lower brightness of 0.0008 nits. On the PROLED
We can assume this is due to the new panel design, which aims to “minimize internal reflections common in traditional OLED designs”, so less light is reflected within the panel itself, which could be the difference between those two different black levels.
But if you’re looking at 0.0008 nits and 0.0002 nits and you think the difference must be indistinguishable, then… yeah, right. Both will appear completely black to the human eye when they are supposed to be. But it makes a big difference in the contrast ratio, because the multiplication is too dramatic.
There are other signs that the MacBook Pro’s PROLED XDR display could outperform the iPad Pro in other areas. Apple says it can achieve more than 80% of the BT.2020 color gamut, suggesting it is likely to achieve close to 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut; Our lab measured the iPad Pro at around 82% DCI-P3, so it would be a clear jump here.
The display is powered by a display engine built into the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which Apple says “continuously compensates each pixel for content, usage, temperature and environmental conditions.”
Refresh rates range from 10Hz to 120Hz (with discrete options for filmmakers: 47.95Hz, 48Hz, 50Hz and 59.94Hz) and, as we’ve seen with other Apple products, there’s a nano-textured glass option for people who will be working in overly bright environments.
The big selling point here is the precision of the reference monitor that you can take with you wherever you go, making these MacBook Pros ideal for video professionals and mobile creatives of all kinds.
So do you need it? If you are doing the following wild wood If you go see this movie, it’s amazing, or work with high-resolution, high-quality video, these are by far the best Mac laptops Apple has ever made. But I suspect most of them will end up with people who aren’t video professionals, but who really like good displays. I would love to see Cyberpunk 2077 in one of these.
If you’re technically minded, Apple has put together a comprehensive whitepaper on the new displays and you can read it here.
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