Apple just dropped a bevy of announcements, including for its next MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, now equipped with its in-house M5 and M5 Pro and Max chips. The machines will all be up for preorder starting March 4, and available to buy outright starting March 11.
M5 MacBook Air
The MacBook Air – aka Apple’s best laptop – gets a couple of significant changes, including to its minimum SSD storage, which Apple says has been bumped up to 512GB and is twice as fast as that of the previous generation. The laptop also gets Apple’s custom N1 wireless chip, which adds Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The same chip is found in the new iPad Air that Apple announced yesterday, where it also adds Thread, a wireless protocol tightly associated with smart home control via the Matter standard.
Returning to the MacBook Air are dual Thunderbolt 4 ports and support for two external displays, a 500-nit LCD built-in display with a 12MP webcam in the cutout at the top, and up to 18 hours of battery life, according to Apple’s announcement. Like the M4 MacBook Air, the M5 version will feature a 10-core CPU and up-to-10-core GPU with “Neural Accelerator” in each GPU core, along with a 16-core Neural Engine for helping with on-device AI tasks. The company says the M5 MacBook Air “delivers up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than MacBook Air with M4, and up to 9.5x faster than MacBook Air with M1.” The laptop starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch, while the 15-inch starts at $1,299, with either size available in sky blue, midnight blue, starlight, and silver.
MacBook Pro
The new 14- and- 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops will debut the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, Apple’s upper-crust chips for heavy, professional workloads. As with the MacBook Air, these laptops will feature Neural Accelerators in each of the machines’ up-to-32 GPU cores. (Other options include 16-core and 20-core.) On the CPU side of things, Apple is now touting what it calls super cores. The M5 Pro chip will have either five super cores and 10 performance cores for a total of 15 cores, while a second M5 Pro tier and the M5 Max will get 18-core CPUs with six super cores and 12 performance cores. That’s compared to the vanilla M5 of the base MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, which has four super cores and six efficiency cores. You can read more about their performance in Apple’s standalone announcement for the M5 Pro and Max chips.
Apple has dropped the 512GB storage tier here, so now every MacBook Pro comes with a 1TB or 2TB SSD at minimum, depending on the model, and is configurable up to 4TB, except for the M5 Max version, which can go as high as 8TB. They’ll start with 16GB of RAM (for the base M5 MacBook Pro), 24GB RAM (M5 Pro MacBook Pro), and 36GB RAM (M5 Max MacBook Pro) and can be configured up to between 32GB or 128GB, depending on model.
Beyond storage and performance upgrades, the other new thing is that the new MacBook Pros now have Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which again means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. Otherwise, look for a lot of the same in terms of the laptops’ 120Hz variable refresh rate mini-LED displays with up to 1,600-nit peak brightness and 1,000-nit everyday brightness. They’ll have a variety of ports, including three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, and an SD card slot, and they’ll be rechargeable via the company’s proprietary MagSafe 3 charging port. They’ll support between 2 and four external displays, depending on the model.
The new MacBook Pro laptops start at $1,699 (M5), $2,199 (M5 Pro), and $3,599 (M5 Max) for the 14-inch models. And they’ll come in space black and silver, as before.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
