Bloomberg reported today that Apple's long-awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro will launch on M5 Pro and M5 Max chips rather than the M6 generation, with OLED screens in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes expected between late 2026 and early 2027, a decision that lands the same week Apple raised Mac and iPad prices by 15 to 25 percent over AI-driven memory inflation.
The chip choice is the detail worth sitting with. Apple spent years building a reputation for pairing its most dramatic hardware redesigns with its most powerful silicon. The original M1 MacBook Pro in 2021 married a new chip architecture to a new chassis. The touchscreen MacBook, by contrast, will debut Dynamic Island on the Mac for the first time, introduce OLED panels, and ship its first major visual overhaul of high-end MacBooks in five years, all while running the same M5 Pro and M5 Max that are already shipping in today's lineup. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reported the story today, noted that Apple is already in advanced testing of a follow-up M7 Pro and M7 Max variant slated for as early as late 2027. The M6 generation, it seems, is being skipped at the high end entirely.
There are two plausible reads on that. One is that Apple judged the touchscreen and OLED redesign substantial enough to carry a launch without a new chip underneath it, and that the M5 Pro and M5 Max are still fast enough that most buyers won't notice the gap. The other is that supply chain pressure and competitive timing forced Apple's hand. The AI laptop race has accelerated sharply: Microsoft's Copilot+ Surface line has been on the market since mid-2024, and every quarter Apple delays a credible AI-native Mac is a quarter that narrative belongs to someone else. Getting the touchscreen MacBook out in late 2026 on M5 chips beats waiting another year for M6 silicon, even if it means a slightly awkward product story.
Apple's timing is genuinely uncomfortable. On June 25, just one day before Bloomberg published the touchscreen MacBook details, Apple raised prices across its Mac and iPad lineup, citing an unprecedented surge in memory and storage component costs driven by AI data center demand. The MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage now starts at $1,299, up from $1,099. The Mac Studio M3 Ultra jumped from $3,999 to $5,299. Apple CEO Tim Cook told Fortune the company had "never seen a component price increase this much," and Counterpoint Research found that memory and storage prices have roughly quadrupled over the past three quarters as suppliers redirect production toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI servers require. Apple's shares fell more than 6 percent on Thursday, their worst single-day drop since April 2025.
Into that environment, Apple is now preparing to launch a touchscreen MacBook that will be priced above the M5 Pro MacBook Pro, which currently starts at $1,999. What the premium will look like is not yet confirmed, but the OLED panel and the engineering required to build touch capability into macOS mean the entry price for this machine will almost certainly clear $2,500. That's the live question the chip-skipping decision sharpens. A buyer paying a substantial premium for what is already an M5-generation device will reasonably ask what they're getting for the wait.
The honest answer is quite a lot on the hardware side. OLED brings the contrast ratios and color accuracy that MacBook Pro displays have long lacked compared to iPhone and iPad panels. The Dynamic Island, which replaces the notch and houses the front-facing camera, gives Apple a unified design language across its entire lineup for the first time. The redesigned chassis is the first meaningful visual change to high-end MacBooks since 2021. Touch support in macOS will require Apple to rework interaction patterns across the operating system, something the company has reportedly been building toward for years. None of that is trivial. But it also doesn't change the competitive optics of shipping a premium 2026 machine on 2025 chips.
Microsoft has been direct about positioning Copilot+ PCs, including the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop lines, as the AI-native choice for Windows users. The Neural Processing Unit specifications required for the Copilot+ badge have given Microsoft a concrete marketing hook, one Apple hasn't yet answered at the laptop tier with a comparable on-device AI story at scale. The M5 chip does include a Neural Engine capable of on-device AI tasks, and Apple Intelligence features have been expanding across the platform, but the narrative around AI-first laptops has largely run through the Windows side of the market. A touchscreen Mac with a genuinely new design gives Apple a strong product story. The chip generation beneath it just isn't the one Apple would have chosen if the timeline were entirely its own.
What the M7 follow-up in late 2027 tells you is that Apple views the touchscreen MacBook as a long-running product line, not a one-generation experiment. The two-model cadence, M5 first, M7 next, mirrors the pattern Apple used with the original Apple Silicon transition: ship the product, prove the concept, then push the chip performance. For buyers who can wait, the M7 variant will almost certainly be the more complete machine. For buyers who want the new form factor the moment it ships, the M5 Pro and M5 Max are not exactly a consolation prize, they're just not what anyone expected to see under this particular hood.
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