The holiday shopping season is upon us, and it’s a popular time of year to shop for a new Mac. Apple’s selection right now is as good as it’s ever been; however, if you’re buying a Mac more because you want to and less because you need to, there are very good reasons to wait until next year.
The latest report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterates Apple’s big plans for the Mac in 2026. In the first half of the year, Apple plans to ship the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro. Apple usually ships these high-end laptops along with the base M-series MacBook Pro, but it changed its release cycle this year when the M5 MacBook Pro was released about three weeks ago, sans the Pro and Max models.
According to a previous report, the delay was caused by Apple’s redesign of the M5 Pro and Max, which separates the CPU and GPU blocks, allowing for more customization of cores. The M5 MacBook Air will be released, too, though it’s not clear if it will be at the same time as the new MacBook Pro. And then there’s the rumored affordable MacBook that uses an iPhone chip, made to compete with Chromebooks and cheap Windows PCs.
Gurman then says that in the middle of 2026 (we’re guessing between May and WWDC26 in June), Apple will update two desktop Macs. The Mac mini will get the M5 and M5 Pro, and the Mac Studio will get the M5 Max and M5 Ultra. Then, around this time next year, the M6 MacBook Pro will be released.
That’s a pretty big Mac release schedule, but Apple has even bigger plans. Previous reports indicate that Apple is planning a major overhaul of the MacBook Pro, featuring an OLED display, a thinner design, and a touchscreen in the M6 Pro and M6 Max models. Gurman thinks these laptops will be released late next year or in early 2027.
Conspicuously missing from the schedule are the iMac and the Mac Pro. Both of these are low-volume sales machines for Apple, so it’s not surprising that they are on longer update cycles. The iMac currently has an M4, so it seems feasible that Apple could upgrade it to an M5 or skip a generation and wait for the M6; no reports have been made about an iMac chip or design update.
The Mac Pro, however, tops out with an M2 Ultra chip, which has been eclipsed by the M4 Pro, M4 Max, and M3 Ultra in terms of CPU performance. We haven’t heard any solid reports have been made about the Mac Pro, though perhaps the aforementioned high-end M5 chip block redesign will play a role in the tower Mac’s release.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.