The fabled OLED MacBook may still greet us in the year 2026. It just may not be the uber-powerful laptop rumors initially promised it would be. For the supposed next-gen “MacBook Ultra”—or whatever it’s called—you may have to sit on your hands for a full year and change.
Rumors initially suggested Apple’s first OLED MacBook with its supposedly vibrant, contrast-filled touch display would make use of high-end M6 chips. These were initially supposed to be the sequel processors to the M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max. Bloomberg’s Apple leaker-in-chief, Mark Gurman, sounded the horn on Thursday to temper your expectations, proclaiming that Apple would only launch an M6 without any more powerful variants like the M6 Pro or M6 Max.
Gurman finally offered an idea of what this meant for the OLED touchscreen MacBook on Friday. These high-powered 14-inch and 16-inch OLED models would make use of either the M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. Bloomberg claims, based on anonymous sources with knowledge of Apple’s plans, that Apple will hold off until 2027 and only then release an M7 Pro and M7 Max chip built for both MacBook Pro models and these OLED Macs as well.
Bloomberg claims Apple is designing these M7 chips with a much beefier GPU. While it will be handy for rendering, it mainly implies the ability to run heavy-duty AI workloads—whether that’s AI coding or running agentic programs like OpenClaw. That AI push seems to be reaching across all of Apple’s high-end computing stack. Gurman even suggested that a supposed M7 Ultra is slated for a refreshed Mac Studio desktop that’s also expected in 2027.
These processors are both known quantities. Apple’s 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro is an extremely powerful laptop capable of some truly impressive rendering and real-time graphics capabilities. The 18-core M5 Max’s CPU benchmark scores are unmatched compared to any other Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm laptops released this year. Its GPU is very powerful for graphics-related tasks as well, even including real-time light simulations like ray tracing.
By this fall, multiple PC makers hope to debut their first RTX Spark PCs featuring Nvidia’s first laptop CPU in nearly two decades. We still haven’t had the chance to gauge its overall processing potential. However, Gizmodo did have the opportunity to get an overview of RTX Spark’s performance running on an early version of the upcoming Microsoft Surface Ultra. It seemed to perform well in real-time graphics tasks, gaming, and AI scenarios.
Nvidia’s chip has been in development for close to two years at this point, and we fully expect the M5 Max to hold its own. Still, Apple desperately wants to hold its lead, and that means designing chips that go even further than its current M5 Max’s 40-core GPU allows. Just don’t expect any of these laptops to be cheap. After this week’s price hikes, a MacBook Pro now starts at $2,000, and the M4 variant demands $2,500, while an M5 Max chip costs an astronomical $4,100 with its 32-core GPU. An OLED MacBook is destined to be even more expensive.
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