It’s been over a year since we first heard about Apple’s plans for a total redesign of the MacBook Pro, and we’re expecting to see the results later this year.
While the Cupertino company is predictably expected to head even further down the path of thinner and sleeker laptops, it’s interesting to note that several PC brands are headed in the opposite direction …
Apple’s quest for slimmer MacBooks
While Apple Silicon MacBooks offered dramatically better performance and power efficiency in a significantly sleeker form factor, the integrated nature of the chips and circuit boards meant the end to easy DIY upgrades of RAM and SSDs.
And as my colleague Ryan Christoffel recently noted, that wasn’t the only drawback to Apple’s quest to make the machines as thin as possible.
Apple launched a MacBook Pro in 2016 that became infamous for prioritizing form over function. It was thinner and lighter than the previous model, but with two major drawbacks: all ports except USB-C were dropped to achieve the thin body, and the new butterfly keyboard proved unreliable due to sticking keys.
2026 MacBook Pro expectations
While Apple reversed course on the keyboard, and made the replacement model slightly thicker to accommodate it, we’re now expecting a thinner model later this year incorporating an OLED screen.
Other possibilities include a touchscreen display and cellular data support.
But Dell, HP, and Lenovo taking a different path
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