MacBook Pro

M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros arrived in March 2026 with higher starting prices, while reviews praised performance but faulted the unchanged five-year-old design.

Who they are

MacBook Pro is Apple’s professional laptop line, covered chiefly as the high-performance tier of the Mac family alongside MacBook Air, Mac mini, iMac and Apple silicon. Stories track its chip generations, pricing, ports and displays, as well as whether the hardware serves the pro users Apple targets.

The recent arc

Recent coverage accelerated in 2025Q4 and 2026Q1 around the M5 generation. Apple unveiled M5 Pro and M5 Max with a new Fusion Architecture and GPUs with Neural Accelerators, then set M5 MacBook Pro pricing at $1,699 for the 14-inch model, with Pro and Max configurations starting at $2,199 and $2,699. PCMag’s March review found the M5 Max’s “Super core” architecture and 40-core GPU highly capable, but said the machine retained a five-year-old design and had become more expensive.

The story then shifted from the shipping M5 refresh to reports of a redesign: Bloomberg reported that touch-screen MacBook Pros could be delayed by memory shortages, and later described an entry-level 14-inch model for the first half of 2027 with a design aligned to Apple’s upcoming touch-screen laptops. Earlier reports similarly pointed to a slimmer MacBook Pro with OLED touch capability and a new camera cutout.

The tension

Coverage centers on a mismatch between rapidly advancing Apple silicon and slower visible hardware change. The M5 Max review captures that conflict directly: substantially stronger performance versus an aging chassis and higher prices. Rumored touch input, Dynamic Island-style interface elements and a thinner OLED redesign would be a significant departure for a product line shaped in part by Apple’s earlier response to pro-user objections over the Touch Bar and missing ports; MacBook Air remains the adjacent Apple laptop against which differentiation matters.

Why it matters

If Apple follows through on the reported redesign, MacBook Pro could become the vehicle for reconciling its performance-led silicon roadmap with a new interaction model and industrial design. That would test whether professional buyers see touch and OLED as meaningful upgrades rather than change for its own sake, especially after the M5 cycle highlighted pricing and design fatigue. The reported memory-supply constraint also leaves the timing and scope of that transition uncertain.

Related: Apple · MacBook Air · Mac · MacBook Pro 16" (M5 Max) review: “Super core” architecture and 40-core · MacBook Pro updates show Apple listened to pro users, who never warmed