Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro might get its own Dynamic Island

A new report descibes a 'refreshed, dynamic user interface' that blends iOS with macOS.

Summary created by Smart Answers AI

In summary:

• Macworld reports that Apple’s upcoming 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros may feature touchscreen OLED displays with Dynamic Island technology, marking the first Macs with touch capabilities.
• The laptops are expected to include touch features like pinch-to-zoom, fast-scrolling, and larger menu selections with a dynamic interface adapting between touch and traditional input.
• These revolutionary MacBook Pros with hole-punch camera cutouts and iPhone-like Dynamic Islands are anticipated to launch near the end of 2026.

In his latest scoop, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman dishes out a few details about the touchscreen-enabled Mac laptops we’ve heard about for some time.

The new laptops—14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, specifically—are currently on track to be released near the end of 2026. It sounds like the typical “October to December” timeframe isn’t changing.

According to Gurman, the new MacBook Pros will include OLED displays that include both touch capabilities and the Dynamic Island as seen on the iPhone. As with the iPhone, it will show the status of active tasks, sports scores, alerts, timers, and more. As he describes it, the MacBook Pro’s Dynamic Island will be centered around a hole-punch camera cutout, smaller than the “pill” shape on iPhones. If you have been hoping for Face ID on a MacBook, as we have, it sounds like it might not be there just yet.

But even if it doesn’t have Face ID, this will be the first Mac to ever feature a touchscreen. Steve Jobs famously called touch laptops a bad experience, but those statements date back nearly 20 years, and times have changed.

The new MacBook Pros will still have a large keyboard and trackpad, Gurman reports, and allow you to work entirely touch-free if you like. But they will also include a “refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input,” according to Gurman’s sources. The idea is to let users use as much or as little touch as they like, blending it with traditional pointer input.

When users touch a control, a new menu will spring up surrounding the place they touch, offering touch-centric controls. If you touch a menu bar item, the selections will expand to a larger size than if you had selected it with the pointer, making it easier to make selections with your finger. Of course, standard touch features like fast-scrolling and pinch-to-zoom are expected as well.

It’s not yet clear what other changes these new OLED MacBooks will have, but we expect more than just a new display—prior rumors suggested a thinner body and other design refinements.