What’s Left for ‘Pro and Tell’ Week: Touch-Enabled OLED MacBooks

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple on Wednesday will announce 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models featuring touch-enabled OLED displays with thinner bezels, a Dynamic Island instead of a notch, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and a lighter and slightly thinner design, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. Apple is hosting a private “Pro and tell” experience in Los Angeles starting at 10 a.m. Pacific Time tomorrow.

I’m here in LA for the press shindig tomorrow. One thing I’ve been thinking about regarding these reported touch-enabled OLED MacBooks is that Gurman has reported for months that these new MacBooks will sport M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Here’s Gurman back on June 26:

The MacBook models, positioned at the top of Apple’s lineup, will arrive between late this year and early next year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. They’re planned to be powered by the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. [...]

The first touch-screen 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, will represent the biggest overhaul of Apple’s high-end laptops since the company began moving away from Intel Corp. chips in 2020. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans.

Apple’s decision to use the M5 line before jumping to a future M7 is part of a broader shift in its chip strategy. The company is skipping M6-generation Pro and Max chips altogether, breaking from its usual approach. Bloomberg News reported on this strategy earlier this week.

If that’s all true, it’s certainly unusual for Apple to skip the Pro and Max variants for the M6 chip generation. But there have been oddities with the higher-end Apple Silicon chips before. (There was no M4 Ultra chip, for example, and the M3 Ultra didn’t appear until the March 2025 Mac Studio update, 18 months after the M3 generation debuted.) But what I would find downright weird is the possibility of shipping a second generation of MacBook Pro models based on the exact same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that the current generation offers. They only came out in March. So what’s the idea here? That Apple replaces the current higher-end MacBook Pros with versions whose only upgrades are to the chassis and display, but the performance remains the same? That’s certainly possible, I guess, but it would be weird.

So I’m just wondering if tomorrow’s new touchscreen OLED MacBooks aren’t replacements for the current MacBook Pros, but instead are the start of a new MacBook family with another name. I don’t think they’d call them MacBook “Duos”, because they’re not two-in-one devices. MacBook “Ultras”, maybe — with the same specs as the MacBook Pros but more expensive displays? But “Ultra” seems like a wrong name for a MacBook because Apple’s M-series Ultra chips are (to date at least) desktop only. It’d be weird if the M5 Ultra is exclusive to the Mac Studio while the MacBook “Ultra” maxes out with the M5 Max. So maybe they just are the new MacBook Pros and this first OLED/touch generation uses the same chips as the ones from March?

That’s what I’m most curious about heading into tomorrow.

★ Tuesday, 27 October 2026