It’s the second day of Apple’s big week of announcements, and the company just dropped a ton of new gear, including a new MacBook Pro sporting the company’s latest silicon, the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.
Both the 14- and 16-inch models can be equipped with the new M5 Pro and Max chips, with pre-orders for the new configurations opening on March 4 ahead of full availability on the 11th. The older M5 variant remains available as well.
The new chips are the star of the show, boasting big performance upgrades. Apple says M5 Pro and Max sport a new 18-core CPU architecture, split between six so-called ‘super cores’ — which Apple says are the world’s fastest cores — and 12 performance cores. Apple claims up to a 30 per cent performance boost for pro workloads.
The GPU also got an upgrade, offering up to four times the peak compute for AI compared to prior generations. Further, there’s a faster 16-core Neural Engine with a higher bandwidth connection, enabling faster on-device AI features and Apple Intelligence.
Alongside the new chips, there are a few other upgrades coming to the MacBook Pro. Apple touts two times faster SSD performance, with the M5 Pro variant starting at 1TB and the M5 Max starting at 2TB. Further, Apple bumped up the starting storage for the 14-inch, M5 MacBook Pro to 1TB. Unfortunately, that also means a hefty price increase, with the base model now starting at $2,399 — $300 more than before.
Apple also moved the MacBook Pro to its N1 networking chip, enabling Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
Memory is also getting an upgrade with increased unified memory bandwidth up to 307GB/s on the M5 Pro and 614GB/s on the Max. The M5 Pro can support up to 64GB of unified memory, while the Max handles up to 128GB.
The new MacBook Pro models will be available to pre-order on Apple’s website starting March 4, with full availability on the 11th. The starting prices are as follows:
14-inch MacBook Pro
- M5 – $2,399 (now starts at 1TB storage)
- M5 Pro – $2,999
- M5 Max – $4,999
16-inch MacBook Pro
- M5 Pro – $3,599
- M5 Max – $5,399
You can learn more on Apple’s website.
