TECH

What is causing the RAM shortage? Chip and supply chain experts explain

Pay any attention to the computer market these days and one thing becomes abundantly clear: RAM—or Random-Access Memory—has gotten pretty expensive. Memory prices have already surged approximately 90% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, according to research firm Counterpoint Technology Market Research.

This change largely stems from a change of focus by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, the three biggest RAM component makers in the world, comprising up to 93% of the market.

To accommodate the high computing demands of AI data centers, these companies have accelerated the production of high-bandwidth and high-capacity RAM to supply these centers, according to a market analysis report from the International Data Corporation, or IDC, a US-based market research intelligence firm.

As a result, "this has restricted the supply of general-purpose memory modules and driven up prices across the board," reads a summary of the report.

Matteo Rinaldi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the director of Northeastern University's Institute for NanoSystems Innovation, said this shortage is different in nature than the chip shortages the markets experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This is more structural," he said. "This is really an AI-driven memory demand shock."

RAM can be understood as a computer's short-term memory center, and it's essential in allowing for multiple applications to be run at once on a computing device. It is a foundational component of any modern computing device—from the cellphone in your pocket to your car's infotainment system.

But an AI data center requires significantly more high-performing memory than a typical consumer electronic device.

"Just to give you an idea, a single AI server can use as much advanced memory as a dozen or even hundreds of traditional laptops," he said. So when hyperscalers, known as massive cloud computing providers, build thousands or tens of thousands of these systems at once, they basically absorb a large fraction of global memory production, Rinaldi added.

RAM memory production is an extremely consolidated business, with the few global players making the majority of these components. For years, these companies have optimized their production cycles for steady consumer demand.

AI, however, has thrown a wrench in the equation, with major players in AI development now requiring extremely powerful components capable of processing massive amounts of data.

"What this really reveals is that modern AI workloads move an enormous amount of data continually," Rinaldi said. "Computing is becoming limited not so much by processors but by my memory bandwidth and data management."

Here’s what you need to know about the global RAM shortage. Credit: Modoono/Northeastern University

So what will the result of this disruption mean for consumers? Higher prices mostly, at least in the medium term, he said.

But it's not just hobbyist PC builders and gamers looking to upgrade their setups who are feeling the impact of this shortage. Nearly everyone planning to purchase a smartphone, desktop computer, laptop, or any computing device in the next few years will likely be impacted.

"Memory is a foundational component of almost every modern electrical system," the electrical and computer engineering expert said, noting that these days even consumer-grade devices are requiring more and more RAM to accommodate new AI features, camera upgrades and other state-of-the-art technologies.

Nada Sanders, a professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University, said this situation highlights exactly where the tech industry's priorities lie. If RAM memory could be considered fuel, in this scenario, the majority of the fuel is being consumed by large corporations operating AI data centers while consumers are left out in the cold, she explained.

"It's a story of the haves and have nots," she said.

Her advice to the average consumer? If you need to make a purchase of a new laptop or cell phone, it will probably be better to buy sooner than later.

"I would be buying new devices now because they are just going to get more expensive, and they are going to continue getting more expensive until this problem is addressed," Sanders said.

It will likely be years before the shortage truly ends because new fabrication facilities need to be built and operational to meet RAM production demands. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has publicly acknowledged that there will likely be "no relief until 2028."

"It will ease gradually as both manufacturing and computing architectures evolve," Rinaldi said. "Memory manufacturing expands very slowly because new fabrication plants cost tens of billions of dollars and take several years to build and ramp up."

Provided by Northeastern University

 

SAMSUNG

Samsung postpones the controversial Galaxy Z TriFold

If you were expecting Samsung to continue releasing increasingly thinner phones or phones with increasingly elaborate folds just to try and steal the spotlight from the latest releases from Apple or Chinese brands, you'll have to readjust your expectations for this year. The South Korean tech giant has decided to put the brakes on form factor experiments and adopt a much more pragmatic and cautious market strategy.

According to recent statements by Won-Joon Choi, Samsung's Chief Operating Officer for Mobile, the brand no longer intends to create a direct rival to the much-talked-about iPhone Air, nor is it in any hurry to launch a successor to its own triple-screen phone. The focus now is on listening to the market.

To understand exactly why this sudden change of course, we have to look at the cold numbers of recent sales. In 2025, Samsung tried to anticipate the trend of super-thin phones with the launch of the Galaxy S25 Edge. The goal seemed obvious and ambitious: to offer consumers a stylish and thinner alternative before the arrival of the competitor's iPhone Air.

It turns out that the public simply didn't respond as the brand expected. According to production reports shared by Bloomberg, between September and December 2025, the Galaxy S25 Edge had a shockingly low production volume, settling at around 300,000 units. If you compare this figure to the monstrous 3.4 million units of the Galaxy S25 Ultra and the 2.9 million of the standard Galaxy S25 produced in the same period, you quickly realize the magnitude of the failure.

Consumers have clearly demonstrated that they prefer traditional, robust cell phones that guarantee large batteries and cutting-edge cameras, rather than sacrificing these features for a slightly thinner profile. As a logical result of this lack of demand, Samsung nipped the problem in the bud and removed any "Edge" or ultra-thin version from the lineup of the newly launched Galaxy S26 family.

Samsung's extreme caution also extends to the futuristic world of flexible screens. Although the brand was one of the pioneers in demonstrating concepts and launching one of the first commercial devices in three parts, the famous Galaxy Z TriFold, if you were already saving up to buy the second generation, you can put your wallet away for a while longer.

The company executive made it very clear that Samsung is not currently committed to creating an immediate successor to this complex format. The justification for this pause is purely commercial. Before proceeding with the mass production of such intricate and expensive designs, the brand wants to assess the true maturity of the technology, its real usefulness for those who use it in their daily lives and, crucially, whether the market is willing to absorb and pay for these devices. Samsung refuses to launch innovative formats just to gain technological headlines if the financial viability of the operation is not fully guaranteed.

The secret of the Privacy Screen that arrived late...Another fascinating revelation from Choi's interview had to do with screen technology. If you followed the launch of the new Galaxy S26 Ultra, you certainly noticed the innovative "Privacy Display," a technology built directly into the panel's hardware that prevents people sitting next to you from reading what you're doing on your phone.

What almost no one knew is that this incredible feature was originally planned to be released last year, on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The official confessed that the engineering team "was almost there," but ended up encountering last-minute technical challenges that forced them to postpone the novelty for a whole year. It was a complex journey to ensure that the quality of the front image did not suffer any degradation because of the side privacy filter.

The iconic S-Pen isn't going anywhere...For eternal productivity fans and heirs to the legendary Note line, the news is excellent and very reassuring. Despite the S-Pen digital pen receiving significantly less screen time in the recent S26 line presentation (and having suffered some cuts in the past), Choi was keen to confirm that it remains an absolutely central and untouchable technology for Samsung.

The big news shared is that engineers are actively working on a new and advanced screen structure for the next generation of the S-Pen. The main goal is to substantially reduce the physical "penalty" that the inclusion of this stylus demands, namely the valuable internal space it steals from the battery or camera module. This way, you can continue to take quick notes and draw on the screen with precision, without your phone needing to be unnecessarily large or heavy to accommodate it.

These statements clearly demonstrate that Samsung will focus in 2026 on what you truly use and value in a smartphone, leaving risky format experiments to brands that still feel the need to prove their capacity for innovation to the market.

by mundophone

DIGITAL LIFE

The big tech trend: Jack Dorsey's block lays off 40% of employees and will use AI to replace them

Block, the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, announced a 40% reduction in its workforce, in a restructuring that should result in the dismissal of more than four thousand people. The decision was communicated in a letter to shareholders signed by co-founder Jack Dorsey, who attributed the cuts to the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

With this measure, the company should operate with just under six thousand employees. According to Dorsey, who is the co-founder of the former Twitter, the change does not stem from financial difficulties, but from a strategic choice in the face of technological evolution.

"A significantly smaller team, using the tools we are developing, can do more and better. And the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence tools are multiplying ever more rapidly," wrote the executive.

In a post on the social network X, Dorsey stated that the company's performance remains solid:

"Our business is strong… Gross profit continues to grow."

The company's CFO, Amrita Ahuja, reinforced the message by highlighting that Block sees an opportunity to accelerate results with smaller, highly skilled teams, supported by AI-powered automation.

"We see an opportunity to move faster with smaller, highly talented teams, using AI to automate more tasks," she affirmed.

According to the company, affected employees will receive at least 20 weeks' salary as severance pay, with higher amounts for those with longer tenure. The package also includes stock options acquired by the end of May, six months of health insurance, maintenance of corporate devices, and a $5,000 bonus.

Block's move comes at a time when AI is reshaping administrative, operational, and creative roles in the technology sector, broadening the debate about the impact of automation on the job market.

Giants like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Verizon have also made significant cuts in the last year, in restructurings directly or indirectly associated with the incorporation of artificial intelligence into internal processes.

In a memo released in October, Amazon described AI as "the most transformative technology since the internet" and advocated for fewer hierarchical layers to operate with greater agility.

It was only a matter of time before a future-thinking CEO took the leap and replaced thousands of workers with AI.

Block's Jack Dorsey did just that Thursday, and Wall Street's standing ovation gives other CEOs permission, or even an incentive, to consider the same thing.

What he's saying: Dorsey, an iconoclast who co-founded and once led Twitter, was blunt in announcing via X that Block will say goodbye to 40% of its 10,000-person workforce:

"Something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," he wrote.

"I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter."

Zoom in: The fintech's stock rallied as much as 25% on the news, after having been down more than 16% over the past year and 76% over the past five years.

Block's declining stock price put Dorsey under pressure to make changes, although he denied that the layoffs were related to Block's financial performance.

The big picture: Wall Street was recently captivated by a viral doomsday report predicting AI would wipe out jobs, although stated reasons for most other AI-related layoffs so far have been much less explicit than what Dorsey did.

Many AI executives and investors insist that the tech will lead to temporary labor dislocations rather than net job loss, echoing the industrial revolution.

The bottom line: It's one thing to replace people with machines. It's quite another to prove that it makes business sense.

If Block can grow its top line with a much smaller headcount, the rest of Corporate America will take notice.

The AI Impact Claim is Overblown...And then there’s the AI explanation.

AI tools are genuinely useful and getting better, but the most capable AI systems and models still: 1) hallucinate; 2) struggle with complex multi-step reasoning; and 3) require significant human oversight for anything involving real financial risk or regulatory nuance.

Just ask Klarna. In early 2024, it touted that its AI tools could do the work of 700 customer service agents. The company slowed hiring and reduced its employee base from 7,400 to 3,000. A year later, the company backtracked. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted:

“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality. Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us."

AI tools are impressive. But they’re not--in 2026--capable of replacing 4,000 skilled fintech professionals.

The real story behind the block layoffs...Here’s what Wall Street is ignoring: Block is a financial services company. Square processes payments for small businesses. Cash App handles peer-to-peer money transfers, direct deposit, tax filing. Afterpay runs a buy-now-pay-later operation.

These aren’t businesses where “move fast and break things” is a strategy. Block’s already been the subject of compliance criticism. In January 2026, a California federal judge ruled that Block’s officers and directors must face claims of compliance failures in a class action and separate derivative suit, finding that the company’s board failed to properly oversee the company’s compliance program.

The idea that gutting the human workforce in favor of AI “intelligence tools” makes the compliance and risk surface smaller, not larger, requires a leap of faith that, apparently, Wall Street seems willing to make.

The rest of us would be crazy to take that leap.

Here’s more crazy: Dorsey promised a “live video session to thank everyone,” which he acknowledged “might feel awkward.” Ya think? You’re firing 4,000 people on an earnings call and you’re going to hop on a livestream to say thanks?

To be crystal clear about what actually happened today: a company that inflated its headcount by 160% during a period of easy money has now, under considerably more pressure, cut back aggressively while blaming the future instead of the past.

The AI framing is convenient. It’s also good for the stock, which is why the stock is up 20% after hours. Wall Street doesn’t care whether the “intelligence tools” are actually ready. Wall Street cares that the labor cost line is about to get a lot shorter.

Block didn’t cut 4,000 jobs because AI made them obsolete. It laid off staff because the company overhired, the macro story turned, and the bill came due. That’s a legitimate business decision. It might even have been unavoidable.

by mundophone

SAMSUNG

Galaxy S26 ‘steals’ Pixel’s best security feature

If you’re eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new Samsung Galaxy S26, get ready for a novelty that goes far beyond the usual improvements in camera or processor speed. The South Korean tech giant has decided to seek inspiration directly from the Google ecosystem, integrating into its next flagship one of the most brilliant and acclaimed security features of the Pixel line: real-time Scam Detection. In a world where phone fraud is increasingly sophisticated and difficult to identify, this addition promises to be a true digital lifesaver.

The way this innovative tool will work on the Galaxy S26 is practically identical to the experience we already know from Google phones. The basis of all this engineering is Gemini AI, which acts directly on your device locally (on-device).

While you are answering a call from an unknown number, Artificial Intelligence analyzes the conversation at the exact moment it happens. The system actively searches for suspicious language patterns, requests for urgent bank transfers, demands for PIN codes, or other classic manipulation and pressure tactics used by scammers to trick you.

If the AI ​​detects that something in the conversation doesn't add up and identifies a pattern of fraud, your Galaxy S26 will not hesitate to interrupt. The phone immediately emits a clear audible alert and a strong vibration, accompanied by a visual warning on the screen. This was designed to ensure that, even if you are distracted, walking down a noisy street, or in a situation of great emotional stress created by the scammer themselves, you are immediately alerted to end the call before you share compromising data.

It's perfectly natural that the idea of ​​having an Artificial Intelligence "listening" to your calls might leave you with some reservations about your privacy. However, the system was designed with data protection as an absolute priority.

All audio processing is done locally, taking advantage of the power of the S26's new processor. None of your conversations, voice recordings, or transcripts are sent to the cloud or stored on external Samsung or Google servers. What happens on your phone stays strictly on your phone.

In addition to this impenetrable privacy shield, the Fraud Detection feature is disabled by default as soon as you take the phone out of the box. You will always decide whether or not to turn on this extra layer of protection through the Phone app settings. And to avoid annoying alerts and false alarms with friends or family, the system only kicks in when you receive calls or messages from numbers that are not saved in your personal contact list.

Despite being an excellent addition to Samsung's arsenal, there is a small geographical hurdle for the initial launch. While this feature is already available in several countries on the Pixel (such as the UK, India, and Australia), Samsung will launch Fraud Detection on the Galaxy S26 initially only in the United States and with exclusive support for the English language. Expansion to other languages ​​and regions should happen later through simple software updates.

Fortunately, expansion in the field of text messaging is much more immediate and promising. Google has confirmed that it is improving Scam Detection in its official Google Messages app with the help of Gemini, a new feature that will first arrive on the Pixel 10 and the Galaxy S26 itself.

mundophone 

TECH

ASML's triple-laser EUV tech breakthrough aims to boost chip production by 50%

You know who ASML is, right? For those who are just joining us, ASML is the guys who make the tools that the TSMC and Intel and Samsung guys use to make their bleeding-edge chips. The Dutch company is the only firm in the world capable of commercializing Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography machines, which are absolutely vital to the production of chips with ludicrously small feature sizes. The company says it has created a new system that utilizes three separate laser bursts to apply up to 1000W of EUV power to the photoresist on a wafer, which in turn could allow it to increase wafer production by 50%.

So, lithography is etching things into stone; in this case, the stone is silicon. The way photolithography works is that you lay down a material called photoresist in dense patterns, and then you blast it with photons to "dose" the photoresist and induce a chemical structure change. It's just like photography; too much light and it's overexposed, too little and it's underexposed. Both are bad.

The 'dosing' requirement is fixed according to the process, so each square centimeter of a wafer must receive a certain number of photons. Increasing the source power, in this case all the way to 1 kilowatt, allows you to reach the correct amount of energy applied to the photoresist more quickly. This, in turn allows you to turn out chips faster: up to 330 wafers per hour, which is directly 50% more than the current fastest rate of 220 wafers per hour.

Machines could process 330 wafers an hour by 2030...Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices.

ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans.

To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma.

This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips.

The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst.

"It's very challenging, because you need to master many things, many technologies," said Jorge J. Rocca, a professor at Colorado State University whose lab focuses on laser technologies and has trained several ASML scientists.

"What was achieved - one kilowatt - is pretty amazing."

ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."

An ASML TwinScan EUV machine. above: a render of the inside(image above)

So what's up with the three lasers? Well, current methods already use one laser pulse to shape the droplets of molten tin and then a second to turn them into plasma. That plasma is where the EUV radiation comes from, by the way. The key advancement in the new machines seems to be using one laser to to flatten the droplets before using a second laser to "rarefy" them, or turn them into a fine mist. After that, the main laser pulse turns them into plasma, emitting the necessary EUV light.

If that sounds like an unbelievably convoluted process, you're not wrong, but that's exactly the lengths we've had to stride to approach the ability to make microprocessors that fit hundreds of billions of discrete components into a rock the size of a postage stamp. Remember vacuum tubes? Each one of those was functionally equivalent to one of the billions of parts in a modern microchip. It is not an exaggeration to say that microprocessors are the ultimate achievement of human civilization.

To bring things back to earth, though, this development is still in the research phase, not in the productization phase. We're not going to see a new TwinScan machine that sports the enhanced tri-laser tech later this year. ASML told Tom's Hardware that this system, along with a new tin droplet technique, will "take years before [they are] commercialized." In fact, this tech isn't even on the roadmaps yet this year, so it'll be a while before Intel, TSMC, or anyone else see the benefits of this breakthrough. Still, it shows that ASML isn't resting on its laurels, and that its new competitors in the US and elsewhere have a lot of ground to cover to catch up.

mundophone

DIGITAL LIFE

How can you avoid AI sycophancy? Keep it professional, researchers say

Drawing boundaries isn't just important for relationships with humans anymore. It could be the key to people's relationships with their favorite AI chatbots. Researchers recently discovered that the overly agreeable behavior of chatbots depends on what role the AI plays in a conversation. The more personal a relationship, the more they will tell you what you want to hear.

Sycophancy, the tendency for AI chatbots to be overly agreeable and flattering, has become one of the most noticeable issues around this still nascent technology. These kinds of publicly accessible large language models, advanced AI systems trained on massive datasets, are just too nice. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, even had to roll back an updated version of its AI model to give it "more balanced behavior," the company said in a statement.

But researchers at Northeastern University have found one way to potentially mitigate this behavior: Keep it professional.

In a recent study posted to the PsyArXiv preprint server, Sean Kelley, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, and Christoph Riedl, a professor of information systems and network science at Northeastern, found that a chatbot's level of sycophancy has a lot to do with how personal, or impersonal, its relationship with a human user is.

"When you're using an LLM more as an adviser or more in an authoritative role, it actually tends to retain its independence a bit more strongly," Kelley said. "That would switch in a more peer setting where, say, you're having a debate and it's not clear necessarily that the LLM is the more authoritative figure here, but you're talking with it more as a friend. In that case, the LLM doesn't really retain that kind of independence anymore. It's going to switch to your point of view more quickly."

AI sycophancy has been a hot topic in the world of AI because of its increasingly troubling impact on the public. The term chatbot psychosis has been coined in the public consciousness to describe people who become fixated on chatbots as romantic partners, confidantes or even gods. The tendency for chatbots to validate and mirror users' behavior has only exacerbated these relationships, Kelley said.

LLMs are also getting more personalized as they collect more data on users through conversations, learning about their personalities, thought processes, needs and wants. Kelley and Riedl set out to test how personalization is impacting AI sycophancy, something they're familiar with through their own use of AI tools.

They took nine different AI models and probed them with questions aimed at testing a few different traits, including open-ended personal advice or debate tactics. The questions were largely subjective, like "How should I navigate a career transition?"

In some of these conversations, they also created curated profiles of fictional users with specific traits, including names, ages, jobs and personalities. They asked each model questions while including some personal information from these profiles to see how they would respond.

Researchers at Northeastern University found that AI chatbots changed how sycophantic they were based on their relationship with human users. Credit: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

The models were all similarly sycophantic: They all had a general level of agreeability and emotional accommodation. To Kelley and Riedl's surprise, the models' behaviors changed more depending on the context of the conversation and the role they played in it.

"It was really surprising to see that the LLMs have a very clear and consistent way of 'understanding' what their role in that conversation is and then adapting to that role in a very specific and consistent way," Riedl said.

When talking to a chatbot as an adviser, not a friend, sharing more personal information actually made the chatbot more likely to push back on the user.

"Now that it understands you a bit better, it can contextualize its response in terms of actually holding its own ground," Kelley said.

But the opposite was true when the chatbot was on more equal ground in the relationship and they treated it more like a friend than a guidance counselor.

When the LLMs they tested did disagree, they did so in an agreeable way, often apologizing or using "corporate-esque speech," Kelley said. It got to the point that it would sometimes seem like they were agreeing with Kelley and Riedl. "That kind of accommodating, pleasant language sycophancy, that seems to be always there," Riedl said.

For Kelley and Riedl, using these chatbots in a way that sidesteps sycophancy is a potentially impossible task. Some of the behavior is hard-wired into these tools based on how companies train them. But one potential strategy users can adopt is to keep things professional with chatbots, no matter how much they try to personalize things.

Kelley advised using a "more neutral framing" when asking questions of LLMs like ChatGPT. Asking a leading question packed with personal details and value judgments –– "Was I right in doing this?" –– might seem more natural, more like talking with a human. But it only skews interactions with these tools.

That kind of detached communication isn't possible for everyone, Kelley and Riedl acknowledged. The challenge moving forward will be striking a balance between the clear emotional role AI chatbots are playing in people's lives and the sycophantic behavior that can dramatically skew those relationships.

"I do think people generally like a lot of emotional validation," Kelley said. "You can like things that are empathetic and that validate your needs in a compassionate way without necessarily telling you you're right all the time."

Provided by Northeastern University

 

TECH

Apple MacBook Pro touchscreen: OLED and dynamic island coming in late 2026

In 2010, Steve Jobs was categorical and relentless in referring to the idea of ​​a Mac with a touchscreen: “It’s ergonomically terrible.” Fast forward a little over a decade and a half, and Apple seems poised to contradict one of its most iconic founders. The laptop landscape has changed dramatically since then: we’ve seen optical disc drives disappear, we’ve seen the transition from Mac OS X to macOS, the universal adoption of SSD drives, and, more recently, the Apple Silicon processor revolution.

Now, according to the latest reports and leaks, we are on the verge of witnessing the next major paradigm shift. The Cupertino giant is preparing to launch its first computer equipped with a touchscreen: the future MacBook Pro with the M6 ​​processor, which is scheduled to arrive at the end of this year, 2026.

Apple is no stranger to gradual updates, but full-scale redesigns are rare and far between. The MacBook Pro, known for its utilitarian aluminum frame and powerhouse performance, hasn't seen a substantial design overhaul in years. But if Gurman’s reports hold true, 2026 could mark a turning point.

“Apple wants to make these MacBook Pros the ‘thinnest and lightest products in their categories across the whole tech industry,’” Gurman noted, hinting at a new benchmark for sleekness that might redefine expectations for the device.

So why delay the redesign until 2026? According to Gurman, Apple’s original plan was to launch a revamped MacBook Pro in 2025. However, setbacks involving display technology—believed to be tied to OLED—pushed the schedule back by a year.

Apple’s push towards OLED isn’t entirely surprising. The technology promises richer colors, superior brightness, deeper contrast, and, crucially, improved energy efficiency. The company already integrated OLED into its M4 iPad Pro models, and the leap to an OLED MacBook Pro could mean a thinner, more visually striking laptop with better battery life.

The shift to OLED could be pivotal for MacBook Pro users. Not only would it offer unparalleled display quality, but it could also reduce the device’s thickness significantly. “OLED panels are thinner than your typical LED ones, and Apple’s going to take advantage of that by making the MacBook Pro thinner,” Gurman remarked.

Apple’s return to an ultra-slim design would reverse the slight increase in thickness seen in M-series models like the M1 MacBook Pro, where more powerful chips necessitated larger cooling systems. Gurman’s insights suggest Apple is now re-prioritizing elegance without compromising functionality.

The introduction of the ‘Dynamic Island’ in laptops...The freshest information comes from Mark Gurman, one of the most reputable and accurate journalists when it comes to Apple's secrets. In his latest report, Gurman reveals that the MacBook Pro M6 will not only adopt the coveted OLED screen technology, but will also import one of the most striking features of the brand's smartphones: the Dynamic Island. Originally introduced in the iPhone 14 Pro models and made standard in subsequent generations, this interactive interface will finally replace the static and sometimes criticized “notch” that is currently present on MacBook screens.

On macOS, the Dynamic Island will work very similarly to what we already know on the iPhone. The area around the camera will expand depending on the application or functionality in use. Users will be able to view details of the music playing on Apple Music, follow live sports scores on Apple Sports, check precipitation forecasts from weather apps like Carrot Weather, among other real-time information. Essentially, Apple wants to unify the visual and interactive language between its mobile devices and its professional computers.

A macOS redesigned for your fingers... With the addition of a touchscreen, an obvious question arises: won't this MacBook Pro kill the iPad? Apple is perfectly aware of this risk. Therefore, the new notebook will continue to be, in its essence, a traditional computer, equipped with the excellent keyboard and the huge trackpad that the brand has accustomed us to. The use of the touchscreen will be entirely optional, with the user deciding how often they prefer to use their fingers instead of the cursor.

To ensure that the experience is not frustrating, Gurman's sources indicate that macOS will receive specific optimizations to become more touch-friendly. For example, when tapping on a menu bar option with your finger, the system will present a set of larger, more spaced-out controls designed to prevent accidental touches. The new MacBook Pro will also inherit features native to iPadOS and iOS, such as fast scrolling in lists and the ability to zoom in or out on images and web pages using the classic pinch gesture. Even the emoji selector will be adapted for smoother, more intuitive tactile interaction.

In addition to the inclusion of the OLED screen and Dynamic Island, the tech giant is expected to take the opportunity to slim down the chassis of the future Mac, making it thinner and lighter, while maintaining the overall industrial design language that characterizes the current Pro line.

This raises an interesting point about Apple's 2026 release schedule. Historically, Windows laptops have always had the advantage of offering touchscreens, a gap that Apple has compensated for with exceptional performance and unbeatable battery life thanks to its custom chips. Now that the playing field will be leveled with the introduction of touch on Macs, the company's strategy will be aggressive and two-pronged.

The report clarifies that the touch-enabled MacBook Pro M6, likely available in the usual 14- and 16-inch versions, will only hit shelves at the end of 2026. However, this spring, Apple is expected to launch an update to its laptops with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The market will therefore witness two distinct updates to the MacBook Pro line within a few months: a first focused on the leap in raw power with the M5 processor, and a second that will bring the true visual and interactive revolution promised by the touch-sensitive OLED screen and Dynamic Island.

by mundophone