The MacBook Pro with M5 is alive
Continuing the company’s cavalcade of M5-related announcements, Apple today announced the new 14-inch MacBook Pro powered by its latest processor.
But hold on, you might say, aren’t there more MacBook Pros than just the one? Well, yes, but it seems that—as rumored—the M5 Pro and M5 Max processors are not yet ready for primetime, so today’s announcement is just the base-level MacBook.
Apple says its new M5 processor brings significant performance improvements to the MacBook Pro, including 3.5x the AI1 performance, thanks to new Neural Accelerators built into the GPU cores, much like on the latest generation of iPhones. (No surprise there, as the A19 Pro cores that power the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro are from the same processor family.) The company also touts a faster CPU, revamped Neural Engines, and more memory bandwidth (153GB/s compared to 120GB/s on the M4 model), all of which contribute to its performance gains over its predecessor.
According to the company, the new MacBook Pro also features faster SSD performance thanks to newer storage technology, which also enables an upgrade option for 4TB of storage (at an additional eye-watering $1,200).
Specs otherwise remain unchanged from the M4 model, from the 10-core CPU/10-core GPU configuration down to the physical dimensions and weight, battery life, and colors: your basic Silver and Space Black.2 Like its predecessor, the M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,599.
- If you had “Apple brags about AI performance” on your bingo card, I’m sad to say you can stack all your chips there. That’s how bingo works, right? ↩
- This despite a teaser video yesterday from Apple marketing honcho Greg Joswiak that seemed to suggest a blue model might be incoming. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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