MacBook Ultra’s New Design Won’t Stay Exclusive for Long

The touchscreen and the OLED panel have dominated discussion about Apple’s next high-end laptop, but the redesign wrapped around them may prove to be an equally consequential change, largely because it is not expected to stay unique to the machine for long.

Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman last week laid out Apple’s plan to refresh every Mac it sells over the next two years. In the report, he mentioned that the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro due in 2027, reportedly code-named K104, is said to resemble the design of the high-end K114 and K116 machines while using a standard M7 chip. The design debuting on the rumored “MacBook Ultra” would therefore reach a considerably cheaper Mac within roughly a year of launch, a pattern first reported at the start of July.

Apple last redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2021 alongside the introduction of the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and that overhaul ran in the opposite direction to this one. The machine grew thicker and heavier, and Apple restored the HDMI port, the SD card slot, and MagSafe charging that it had stripped out in the preceding generation. Five years on, the company is apparently trying to reverse the thickness.

The chassis is expected to be noticeably thinner and lighter. Swapping a mini-LED backlight for a hybrid OLED stack removes an entire physical layer from the lid, since ‌OLED‌ pixels emit their own light. There has so far been no indication that Apple intends to sacrifice ports to find the rest of the millimeters, which is just as well given how poorly that went last time.

The front of the machine is where the change should be most obvious. The notch is expected to disappear in favor of a much smaller hole-punch camera, a change first indicated on a roadmap from research firm Omdia and since corroborated by Bloomberg. The cutout is said to be pill-shaped, paving the way for an interactive Dynamic Island that expands contextually in the way it does on the iPhone.

Whether the screens themselves will grow is less settled. Omdia claimed that Samsung Display will supply 14.3-inch and 16.3-inch panels, marginally larger than the 14.2-inch and 16.2-inch displays on current models, which would imply slimmer bezels wrapped around a slightly bigger screen. A February report from Bloomberg, however, indicated that screen sizes were not expected to change, but that rumor may not have accounted for a slight reduction in bezels.

Apple is said to be fitting a reinforced hinge so the display does not wobble when tapped, but it is not clear if this will result in any external visual changes. Gurman described the approach to touch as “touch-friendly, not touch-first.”

What will become of the high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ is still a loose thread. Gurman’s roadmap lists a high-end 14-inch and 16-inch “MacBook” without the Pro suffix, and no separate high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ sits alongside it, though that phrasing is hard to lean on when the exact branding itself is unresolved. The new MacBook “Ultra” could replace the current M5 Pro and M5 Max models outright at a higher price point or arrive above them as a genuinely new tier while they stay on sale.

If the high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ gains Apple’s next-generation M7 Pro and M7 Max chips in late 2027, considering that the entry-level M7 model will gain the MacBook Ultra‘s design in the first half of that year, it seems inevitable that the high-end machines will follow, meaning that all five of Apple’s most powerful laptops will share the same overall design.