Apple’s new MacBook Pro is expensive as hell.
Let’s get that out there right away, because for a lot of people, it will be the only thing that matters. As with so many things in life, though, you get what you pay for. There’s no questioning the quality of the laptop’s display or most of its other hardware components.
But should you buy it? Well, that’s a complicated question in 2026.
We’re in a time of great uncertainty when it comes to buying a computer. Prices are at levels we’ve not seen in recent history, and they may well keep climbing. Meanwhile, users paying close attention to the early developments in both local and agentic artificial intelligence are asking an important question: “What will computing even look like in a few years, and what does that mean for the computer I should buy today?”
Apple’s new MacBook Pro sits at the intersection of all of this uncertainty. In multiple ways, it’s also straddling different worlds.
It arrives amid a changing of the guard in Apple’s leadership, potentially raising questions about the future direction of Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a mass-market consumer product, but configuring it with enough RAM and storage to make it feel future-proof pushes its price into territory mostly only well-funded businesses can afford. It’s firmly rooted in the computing paradigms of the past 20 years, but it shows early signs of flirtation with new AI workflows. It’s a conventional Apple laptop in most ways, but it also has a touchscreen—something that would never have happened in a prior Apple era.
It’s an outstanding, high-quality product, but whether it’s something you should buy depends on you—what you’re doing right now, what you’ll be doing in the future, and what you value.
