Macbook Pro 'preset' display option and calibrated displays

Short answer, for a new 14/16" MacBook Pro (Liquid Retina XDR display):

• If your photography is general purpose, mostly delivered on screen (websites, video, social media), the Apple XDR Display (P3-1600 nits) preset is OK. It uses the full gamut and luminance range of the display.
• If your photography is tightly tied to sRGB SDR workflows, then choose Internet & Web (sRGB). 
• If your photography is tightly tied to print, it’s highly recommended that you create your own custom Reference Mode preset using the Photography (P3-D65) or Design & Print (P3-D50) preset as the starting point, but adjusted for whatever your color requirements are.  For example, you’ll probably want to leave the color gamut at P3 (full hardware gamut of the display), but customize the White Point if needed (D65 or D50?), disable Enable HDR Content, and clamp the Maximum Luminance to a value that won’t make prints too dark, such as 110 nits. 

Sure, you can just choose Photography (P3-D65), as long as you agree with how it’s set up. But its luminance limit is 160 nits, and some (including me) think that’s too high for print. Other photographers prefer D50 as the display white point, so they’ll customize it for that reason.

Longer answer:

The new Reference Mode presets are a major advance in macOS display color. They were created to properly handle the new high brightness, HDR-capable displays that Apple now makes, like the Liquid Retina XDR display in the 14/16" MacBook Pro. The old system of simply using a profile was no longer good enough. The new Reference Mode preset system works a lot more like the calibration presets that the better non-Apple pro desktop displays have had for years.

I absolutely need color accuracy on my display and calibrate my monitor regularly.

By @SRPcashie

How are you doing that? If you are doing it with the same equipment and software you have used for many years, designed for traditional displays, it may not be doing it properly for the Liquid Retina XDR.

Some new devices such as the Calibrite (formerly X-Rite) Display Plus HL and Display Pro HL are properly designed to work with Liquid Retina XDR displays. The ArtIsRight channel on YouTube is a good source of info for calibrating Mac displays, and he recently came out with some videos about Liquid Retina XDR displays and Reference Modes, and (below) a video describing the proper procedure for calibrating the Liquid Retina XDR display with a compatible color device. And this really is calibrating, not just the old-style profiling that traditional Mac displays were limited to.

As with non-Apple pro displays:

• The Reference Modes constrain the factory calibration to your requirements, and the presets let you easily switch between different calibration settings, which is very handy when switching between workflows (e.g print, vs watching an HDR movie, vs creating website graphics). 
• If the factory calibration is suspect, you update the calibration, not the profile. 
• The profile no longer has to do the heavy lifting, so it’s mostly relegated to telling the OS what the current Reference Mode specs are, and the profile is automatically updated to reflect the current Reference Mode. 

This is why old-style calibration does not really work with these displays.