The touchscreen MacBook is still coming—with slower chips inside

If you read the report from yesterday about Apple skipping the M6 Pro and Max in order to accelerate the release of the M7 chip generation, you might be wondering what that means for the upcoming Mac lineup, particularly the touchscreen MacBook Ultra that was supposed to launch with an M6 chip within the next few months.

Those MacBooks are still on the way, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. They will feature Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, instead of the M6 or the allegeedly now-cancelled M6 Pro and Max.

A touchscreen MacBook Pro represents a huge shift for Apple. The 14-inch and 16-inch laptops will be the first computers Apple has ever sold with a touchscreen, while Windows laptops have featured the technology for years. Steve Jobs famously went out of his way to criticize the entire use model for this doesn’t make sense, but then that was in a totally different era.

These laptops will also reportedly be the first to feature OLED displays, likely the same tandem-OLED technology used in iPad Pros today, which Apple markets under the moniker “Ultra Retina XDR.” The laptops are also likely to be Apple’s first to embrace the Dynamic Island interface seen in iPhones, with an area around a cutout camera designed to be used for certain kinds of notifications and alerts. It is unclear if these laptops will have Face ID capabilities or just Touch ID like the current MacBook Pros, but the Dynamic Island will reportedly house the new Siri and other actions, including Live Activities.

All these firsts—first touchscreen, first OLED, first with a Dynamic Island—will be accompanied by the first real industrial design updates for the MacBook Pro in years, according to recent reports. So it’s a big deal, and Apple will certainly want to release it sooner rather than later—hence the use of M5 chips.

While the first models will ship with M5 Pro and M5 Max, Apple is already working on updates for 2027 featuring the M7, M7 Pro, and M7 Max, which are being fast-tracked to get more advanced local AI capabilities to market sooner.