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The next MacBook Air could arrive early next year, but OLED will have to wait

Apple’s next MacBook Air may look familiar on the outside, with M6 expected to be the main upgrade.

By Sudhanshu Kumar Mangalam Published October 25, 2026

Computer, Electronics, Laptop — Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends

Apple may be about to give the MacBook Pro one of its biggest upgrades in years, but the MacBook Air apparently has to wait a little longer for its turn.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to refresh the MacBook Air in early 2027. The upcoming model is expected to stick with a non-OLED display, even as Apple prepares to move its higher-end MacBook Pro lineup to OLED and touch support.

The current MacBook Air is still pretty fresh

Apple last updated the MacBook Air in March, moving the lineup to its M5 chip. The refresh also doubled the starting storage to 512GB and added Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via Apple’s N1 wireless chip. The design itself stayed largely unchanged. It is still fanless, thin, and lightweight, with a Liquid Retina display and up to 18 hours of battery life.

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An early 2027 refresh would therefore put the next MacBook Air roughly a year after the M5 model, which lines up fairly neatly with Apple’s recent update cycle.

The next model could arrive with a simple chip upgrade

The 2027 model of MacBook Air is expected to move to an Apple M6 chip, which has debuted in the Mac mini. Apple’s first 2-nanometer chip uses a new 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU and is designed to improve both performance and power efficiency. We can expect this chip to also power the entry-level MacBook Pro and the refreshed 24-inch iMac, expected to arrive on October 28.

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Sudhanshu Kumar Mangalam

Contributor

Sudhanshu Kumar Manglam is a tech journalist at Digital Trends, where he covers consumer technology, science, and games.

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