Rumors initially suggested that Apple’s first OLED MacBook would use high-end M6 chips with its reportedly vibrant, contrast-filled touch display. Initially these were considered to be the next processors of M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max. Bloomberg’s Apple leaker-in-chief, Mark Gurman, sounded the horn on Thursday to dash your expectations, announcing that Apple will only launch the M6, without more powerful variants like the M6 Pro or M6 Max.
Gurman finally offered an idea on Friday of what this means for OLED touchscreen MacBooks. These high-powered 14-inch and 16-inch OLED models will use M5 Pro or M5 Max chips. Based on unnamed sources with knowledge of Apple’s plans, Bloomberg claims that Apple will hold off until 2027 and only then release M7 Pro and M7 Max chips built for both MacBook Pro models and these OLED Macs.
Bloomberg claims that Apple is designing these M7 chips with much better GPUs. While this will be useful for rendering, it’s primarily meant for the ability to run heavy-duty AI workloads – whether that’s coding AI or running agentic programs like OpenGL. It appears that the AI push is reaching all of Apple’s high-end computing stack. Gurman also suggested that an alleged M7 Ultra is slated for a refreshed Mac Studio desktop, also expected in 2027.
These processors are both known quantities. Apple’s 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro is an extremely powerful laptop that is capable of truly impressive rendering and real-time graphics capabilities. The CPU benchmark scores of the 18-core M5 Max are unmatched by any other Intel, AMD or Qualcomm laptop released this year. Its GPU is also very powerful for graphics-related tasks, even including real-time lighting simulations like ray tracing.
By this fall, several PC makers are expected to launch their first RTX Spark PCs featuring Nvidia’s first laptop CPUs in nearly two decades. We still haven’t had a chance to assess its overall processing power. However, Gizmodo had the opportunity to get an overview of RTX Spark performance running on an early version of the upcoming Microsoft Surface Ultra. It appears to perform well in real-time graphics tasks, gaming and AI scenarios.
Nvidia’s chip has been in development for nearly two years at this point, and we fully expect the M5 Max to hold its own. Still, Apple absolutely wants to maintain its lead, and that means designing chips that go beyond what its existing M5 Max’s 40-core GPU allows. Just don’t expect any of these laptops to be cheap. After this week’s price hike, the MacBook Pro now starts at $2,000, and the M4 variant costs $2,500, while the M5 Max chip with a 32-core GPU costs $4,100. The OLED MacBook is sure to be even more expensive.
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