MacBook Pro M3 with a Dynamic Island?! This leak has us asking questions

We got a first sight of the M3 MacBook Pro’s packaging ahead of its announcement at Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ event. But wait… is that a dynamic island in place of the notch!?

That’s a question being asked by a growing number of people underneath ShrimpApplePro’s X post. So if it pleases the court, allow me to approach the metaphorical bench for evidence for and against this happening.

Notching it out

Let’s take the picture from the ShrimpApplePro’s post, and to paraphrase Captain Picard, enhance it.

While it’s really hard to tell the full outline because of how dark the background is behind the cutout (some users have even questioned the credibility of that wallpaper given the angle of it), the more sharper curve of those bottom edges of what may be the Dynamic Island look a lot more notch-like.

Plus, no matter how secretive Apple can be, the company is a leaky ship when it comes to secrets being revealed closer to events. If a change this significant was coming to a huge product like the MacBook Pro, we would have heard a lot more about it by now.

Taking a trip to the Dynamic Island

Our evidence starts with something spotted by IceCoolTech, and shared on X. It comes from the Universal Control sidebar in iPadOS 17.1 beta, where there seems to be a MacBook silhouette with a Dynamic Island outline cut into the display portion. Could this have been an accidental tease of this tech from the iPhone coming to Apple’s laptops?

And then we have the fact that because of the black part of that wallpaper, we can’t say for sure whether it's a Dynamic Island or not. Like I said, I’m more in the camp of believing this will just be a notch without any significant design update coming for at least a couple more years. But damn, what if? It’s certainly an exciting prospect to ponder.

Our ruling: take it with a pinch of salt

This could very easily just be a case of wishful thinking amongst the Apple fanbase. Turning up the brightness and reducing the contrast does give the impression of a notch outline. Plus, if we were heading towards this, it would be more likely than not that we’d see at least some sort of leak from other sources like Mark Gurman or Ming-Chi Kuo.

But I can’t say for sure given the deep black in that area of the background. Pair that with the image of what seems to be a Dynamic Island-armed MacBook in the iPadOS 17.1 beta, and you could build a rather shaky case for its existence. Just don’t be breathing in too much of that copium — we still need to get FaceID on a MacBook first before we even think about establishing an island on the panel.

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