The Touchscreen MacBook Pro Might Be… Light

Past rumors from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the rumored MacBook Pro with an OLED touch-screen have made the device sound a little confusing—it will apparently come with an iPhone-like Dynamic Island, but will allow the user to opt-out of features that make the experience resemble mobile computing. But here comes one more attribute that may make your next MacBook Pro a bit more mobile: the weight. Gurman claims in his latest anonymously sourced column that it will likely be “significantly lighter” (emphasis Gurman’s) than current models. Gurman doesn’t say how much lighter, however, just that as part of an extensive reengineering of the device, Apple has apparently been “miniaturizing parts and rearranging components to make the computer much easier to carry.” And the most recent crop of MacBook Pros are pretty big. As our reviewer, Kyle Barr, noted, if you bought the 14-inch M5 Max version, it’s 3.56 pounds, with that added bulk coming largely from advanced cooling. The 16-incher is 4.7 pounds according to Amazon. “You can feel the difference in hand, but not at all when the laptop is sitting safe in your backpack,” Barr wrote. 4.7 pounds is not really all that burdensome. My first PC laptop weighed about ten pounds if I recall correctly, but that was a different era. Today, I can buy a 2026 MacBook Air that weighs 2.7 pounds, or a lower-priced MacBook Neo, which packs the same 2.7 pounds into a more compact form factor. In a device with the solid feel of a MacBook, a little added weight can be reassuring. But heft can feel like a genuine tradeoff—if not exactly a flaw. I like the weight of that extra hardware if what I’m doing is hardware-intensive, but if I’m just checking my email on one of the recent, bulkier MacBook Pros, it feels like overkill, and I’d truly rather use something lighter. So a lighter device with a cool new hybrid interface sounds like more of an everyday use device than a bulky brick that makes me feel like I should be editing video. Gurman says he expects Apple to show off the touchscreen MacBook Pro “by next month.”