Want the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display to ignore your fingers? You can turn off the touchscreen completely from System Settings. The catch is that Apple puts the switch under Accessibility, not under the Touch Display settings.
The first touchscreen MacBook Pro began reaching buyers on Friday, November 6. Plenty of new owners will want touch for some tasks and none for others. A palm on the display or a stray tap during a video call is easy to trigger. Apple’s own support guides cover two fixes: switching touch off entirely, or trimming individual gestures.
How to turn off the touchscreen on the MacBook Pro
- Open System Settings.
- Select Accessibility in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down to find it.
- Select Touch.
- Turn on Ignore Touch Gestures.
To bring touch back, follow the same path and turn Ignore Touch Gestures off again.
Most people will look for this in Touch Display settings first, where it isn’t. Apple files it under Accessibility, so it’s worth remembering the path.
Turn off only the gestures you trigger by accident
If touch is mostly useful but a few swipes keep firing by mistake, you can disable those gestures one by one. Go to System Settings > Touch Display. You may need to scroll down the sidebar. Apple lists these options:
- Swipe between pages: one-finger swipe, on or off
- Swipe between spaces: three fingers, four fingers, or Off
- Mission Control: swipe up with three or four fingers, or Off
- App Exposé: swipe down with three or four fingers, or Off
- Notification Center: swipe left from the right edge, on or off
- Show Apps in Spotlight: pinch with thumb and three fingers, on or off
- Show Desktop: spread with thumb and three fingers, on or off
A few system gestures also live at the screen edges. Swiping down from the upper-right corner opens Control Center. Swiping in from the right edge opens Notification Center. Swiping from the top edge over the Dynamic Island brings up Spotlight and Siri AI.
Which Macs this applies to
Only the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display has a touchscreen. It starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch in the US. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 and the Liquid Retina XDR models have no touch display, so none of these settings apply to them.
Touch also costs $400 more than the matching non-touch configuration, as we noted in our MacBook Pro PROLED pricing coverage. If you’re still deciding and expect to keep touch switched off most of the time, the non-touch model is worth a look.
One caveat: Apple’s touch guides don’t say whether Ignore Touch Gestures affects pen or stylus input. They also don’t cover battery life or other user accounts on the same Mac. If any of that matters to you, test it on your own machine first.
Sources: Apple Support, Mac User Guide
