New 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 chip likely won’t get a redesign

While we are awaiting the anticipated debut of the new Apple M2 chip in a 13-inch MacBook Pro refresh in the next month or two, we might have to wait a little bit longer for an actual MacBook redesign.

A supply chain source close to MacRumors told the site that the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is on the way, but that it will feature the same design as the current 13-inch model, including the Touch Bar. 

The new MacBook also won’t include a notch or a ProMotion display like the latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, according to the source.

The source, MacRumors said, is the same person who provided the last-minute leak of the display notch on the latest MacBook Pro models released late last year. 

And since that leak turned out to be correct, there is at least some reason to give this latest news some credence though any leak needs to be treated with some healthy skepticism.

Analysis: We hate to see it, but we likely won’t see any redesign just yet

As we heard last week, there likely won’t be any other spec changes to the 13-inch MacBook Pro this year other than the switch from the Apple M1 chip to the M2. 

Given what we’ve heard about the new chip so far, it’s not likely to feature any additional performance or efficiency cores, with maybe a modest bump in the number of GPU cores. 

Those cores might be faster, but the chip size isn’t likely to be any different so it would be a fairly straight forward swap design wise – i.e. you wouldn’t need to redesign the laptop itself to accommodate a different hardware configuration.

Given that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is probably on its way out anyway, going through the trouble of redesigning a form factor that might be on its last generation simply doesn’t make any sense.