This year’s MacBook Pro refresh felt more subdued compared to past years. Apple made less noise than usual about its new M5 product lineup with a single new 14-inch MacBook Pro model. If the latest leaks are to be believed, you should probably hold off for at least another year. The big MacBook Pro redesign could grant Mac fans everything they’ve wanted since Apple switched to its M-series chips. Yes, that includes the long-promised OLED display, a touchscreen, and a new design that finally excises the notch back to the pits of hell from whence it came.
You can already guess who’s spilling the beans on the next MacBook refresh. Bloomberg’s Apple leaker-in-chief Mark Gurman cited his usual slate of anonymous sources when he claimed that the M6 MacBook Pro would arrive sometime late in 2026 or early in 2027. The current 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro is being sold alongside an M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook from last year. Based on previous leaks, we expect Apple to save its higher-end M5 chips for early next year.
While we can already guess M6 will have improved performance over M5, the next-gen MacBook could finally offer an organic light-emitting diode display. This type of display uses self-emissive material that offers deep “inky” blacks and better contrast than a typical LCD. Apple calls the OLED displays in its latest iPhones “Super Retina XDR,” though the cream of the crop among Apple’s gadget lineup is the tandem OLED—essentially two OLEDs stacked on top of each other for better brightness—found in the M4 iPad Pro and the newly unveiled M5 iPad Pro.
The icing on the cake could be that Apple finally offers a touchscreen on a MacBook Pro. Gurman suggested that the PC won’t be a convertible—those PCs whose screens can twist 90 degrees to act as a kind of tablet. Instead, it would be your usual touchscreen laptop, complete with the usual trackpad. Apple has long resisted putting a touch screen on Macs, figuring that the iPad had that control style covered. However, now that iPadOS 26 finally allows for floating windows for better multitasking, the lines between tablet and MacBook are starting to blur. Apple’s current CEO, Tim Cook, once compared touchscreens on laptops to converging “a toaster and a refrigerator.” I guess we shouldn’t tell him about that toaster with a touchscreen my colleague James Pero recently reviewed.
Is this what Apple thinks of when it imagines a touchscreen MacBook? © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo
Not only could the screen look and feel better, but it may also sport features I and other users have begged Apple to include for years. Current MacBook screens sport a “notch” surrounding the user-facing webcam. The next Mac may push the screen edge-to-edge and replace it with something akin to the iPhone’s Dynamic Island. This feature pops up with notifications and other useful information depending on the app running in the background, such as timers or Uber pickup times.
Both the 14- and 16-inch MacBooks could receive these upgrades, according to Gurman. Apple will likely increase prices of its M6 MacBooks to compensate for the more expensive screen type. Current MacBook Pros use a mini LED format, which Apple calls Liquid Retina XDR. The current base M5 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage starts at $1,600.
The last few MacBook refreshes have left us with machines that perform better every year, but without any changes to their shell, it’s hard to argue anybody should bother upgrading to the latest model if they’re still using an M-series MacBook. Apple may be saving its M5 Pro and M5 Max chips for early 2026 alongside a new M5 MacBook Air. If the company is still apprehensive about a touchscreen Mac, perhaps the company should have another go at the wonky Touch Bar on the defunct 13-inch MacBook Pros, as if we needed a reminder of why you should never do that again.
