The entire MacBook Pro lineup was just announced a week ago, bringing the M4 series of chips for faster performance and Apple Intelligence along with other solid improvements. But there’s still a lot to look forward to down the road for Apple’s most advanced laptops ever. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is developing an all-new redesign for the MacBook Pro as soon as 2026. The MacBook Pro has now been on a five-year cycle for major design changes starting in 2016.
- October 2016 saw a thinner design, yet with several compromises such as the lack of legacy ports and the controversial Touch Bar. It also faced thermal throttling from Intel processors and suffered the butterfly keyboard until late 2019 when it moved to the much better Magic Keyboard.
- October 2021 saw a design that reversed course by adding back the MagSafe 3 port, HDMI port, and an SDXC card slot. It ditched the Touch Bar in favor of the full-height function row keys. This MacBook Pro has been better than before with its advanced Liquid Retina XDR display and powerful Apple Silicon.
Since the last major redesign in 2021, the current MacBook Pro design has seen several revisions:
- October 2021 – 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro featured M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and pioneered the Liquid Retina XDR (mini-LED) display for higher brightness and contrast ratios.
- January 2023 – these machines featured the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips based on the second-generation 5nm process. It was speculated that these machines were originally planned for October 2022, but Apple delayed the release for some reason.
- October 2023 – these machines featured the M3 Pro and M3 Max, in addition to the all-new base M3 model. All of them are based on the 3nm process and now support hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. They also saw slightly brighter XDR displays.
- October 2024 – these machines feature the M4 family of chips. The base M4 model overcomes all the limitations that the M3 model faces, and all models feature the 12MP Center Stage Camera, the nano-texture display option, even brighter XDR displays, and longer battery life.
Based on this pattern, we can expect the M5 revision for next October albeit just a spec upgrade with no major design. However, the M6 family is what we should look forward to the most as it’s expected to be based on the more advanced 2nm process. In addition to the upcoming breakthrough in performance, this next redesign of the MacBook Pro is expected to be thinner and borrow Tandem OLED technology for the iPad Pro since the M4 iPad Pro is what inspires Apple to develop even thinner products as we’ve seen with the Apple Watch Series 10. With all of these exciting possibilities for the next MacBook Pro, we can look forward to as soon as 2026 to see the next big thing for the MacBook Pro.
