Two October Events? Touchscreen MacBook Pro Pegged for October 27

We’ve suspected for a while that Apple would hold a second event in October, and now that its “Welcome Home” experience is officially on for Tuesday, October 13, rumors have begun to circulate on what comes next.

As the name suggests, “Welcome Home” will be all about Apple’s ambitions for the next generation of the living room. That event is expected to focus on Apple’s long-awaited smart home hub along with a new A19-powered Apple TV 4K and second-generation HomePod mini. Anything else that shows up at the event will likely follow in the same vein of the home ecosystem.

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But home products are far from the only things Apple has on deck for the remainder of 2026. The usual lineup of entry-level Macs is due — a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac — with refreshed chips, plus the touchscreen MacBook Pro that we’ve been hearing about for a while. There’s also the so-called “iPad mini 8” that’s expected to launch imminently.

Last week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared that the touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro should arrive by early November, and now he’s putting a date on the calendar: October 27 — exactly two weeks after the “Welcome Home” boutique event in New York.

There are no details on how this event will be conducted — whether it will be another boutique media-only event, a major streamed event, or something in between. In October 2023, Apple held a “Scary Fast” event to unveil the M3 Mac lineup, but changed that up in 2024 with a “Week of Mac” — a series of mini-event videos announcing new Macs over the course of three days.

This could take the same form, and it’s telling that Gurman isn’t using the word “event” to describe this. Instead, he says the products are scheduled to launch “on or around Tuesday, Oct. 27.” There will be an online video presentation and an “in-person component for the press,” but that doesn’t require a full iPhone or WWDC event-style keynote.

It’s also possible that the iPad mini will slip out even sooner. As we noted earlier today, Apple unveiled the current iPad mini on October 15, 2024, quietly pushing it out via a press release two weeks before its Mac unveilings, which ran from October 29–30, 2024.

That was despite expectations that the iPad mini would be lumped into the same set of Mac announcements, so we’re not sure Apple won’t repeat that trend this year.

It may even be more likely to do so, since the touchscreen MacBook is bound to be a much bigger deal than the refreshed M4 iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro models that showed up two years ago. Sure, the Mac mini got a cool new compact design, but that was far more aesthetic than functional.

A touchscreen MacBook Pro is far more of a unicorn. It’s a device that many Mac enthusiasts have been pining for ever since the first iPad came along in 2010. It’s also something that Apple once said it would never do, which makes its arrival even more groundbreaking.

Seemingly contrary to reports that the new touchscreen MacBook will be some kind of new “Ultra” class of machine, Gurman implies these will simply be the evolution of the standard high-end MacBook Pro models:

Since Apple is believed to be skipping the Pro/Max versions of the M6 this time around, these are expected to use the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips as the models Apple released earlier this year. This means there’s a good chance the touchscreen MacBook Pro will simply be the next upgrade to those.

While that may seem unusual, it’s not unprecedented. Apple released a set of M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pro models in January 2023, only to supersede them with equivalent M3 models ten months later — and those ones didn’t feature any other major design changes.

These will be accompanied by an entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with the base M6 chip as a direct upgrade to last year’s M5 model and an M6 iMac that follows up on the 2024 M4 model. Neither is expected to have any meaningful design changes, instead simply being direct processor bumps over their predecessors.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]