The touch-screen Apple MacBook Pro could steal the MacBook Air's best trick

MacBook Pro fans have been waiting years for Apple to drop the weight, and the OLED, touch-screen model coming as soon as November should do just that. The new MacBook Pro is said to be much lighter than today's 16-inch model, which shrinks the gap with the MacBook Air, while borrowing the iPhone 18 Pro Max's Dynamic Island.

The OLED MacBook Pro is getting easier to carry

Bloomberg's lead Apple reporter Mark Gurman, in his latest Power On newsletter, says the high-end MacBook Pro has one more surprise on top of the OLED panel and the touch screen we covered earlier. According to him, the new models are significantly lighter.



Gurman has a strong record on unreleased Macs, and he says these machines are already in testing with macOS 27.2 and should arrive by next month. That lines up with what we heard earlier this year, when OLED panel production reportedly started ahead of schedule.

Why the MacBook Pro's weight matters

The current 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs as much as 4.8 pounds, while the 15-inch MacBook Air comes in at 3.3 pounds, per Gurman. That's a pound and a half more to carry around every day, so even a modest cut should be easy to notice in a backpack.



The screen change could help here too, though Gurman credits the smaller parts inside rather than the panel. Today's MacBook Pro uses a mini-LED display, which is an LCD lit from behind by thousands of tiny LEDs, and that backlight takes up room.

OLED doesn't need a backlight at all, since each pixel makes its own light. Apple's iPad Pro already uses tandem OLED, which stacks two OLED layers so the screen gets brighter without wearing out as fast, and that tablet is just 5.1mm thick. If the MacBook Pro gets the same kind of panel, as earlier leaks suggest, it likely saves a bit of space and weight on its own.

Windows laptop makers have offered light OLED machines for a while, of course. Samsung's 16-inch Galaxy Book6 Pro pairs an AMOLED touch screen with a 1.59 kg (about 3.5-pound) body, and Dell's XPS 14 with an OLED screen starts at 3 pounds.

So if you already own one of those, Apple is catching up rather than leapfrogging you. Still, a touch-screen MacBook Pro that weighs closer to a Galaxy Book would take away one of the easiest reasons to pick Windows for a big-screen laptop.

Who the lighter MacBook Pro is really for

The people who stand to gain the most are the ones who wanted Pro performance but bought an Air to save their shoulders. If the new 16-inch model lands close to the 15-inch Air's weight, that trade-off mostly goes away.

A MacBook Pro that finally travels like an Air

The 16-inch MacBook Pro has long been the kind of laptop that's great on a desk and a chore to carry through an airport. A touch screen and OLED are nice upgrades, but a lighter body is the change most people will feel every single day.

I'd personally love to see the 16-inch model finally slip under 4 pounds.

More on the touch-screen MacBook Pro:

• The touch-screen MacBook Pro's Dynamic Island
• Everything about the MacBook Pro M5
• Everything about the MacBook Air M5

• Follow me on X and Threads

 

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