Apple introduced new 14 inch and 16 inch MacBook Pro models powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, positioned as major upgrades in performance and artificial intelligence capabilities for professional users. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory bandwidth, altogether delivering up to 4x AI performance compared to the previous generation, and up to 8x AI performance compared to M1 models. These gains target developers, researchers, business professionals, and creatives who want to run artificial intelligence enabled workflows directly on the laptop.
The storage and throughput configuration has also been overhauled to support heavier workloads. It now comes with up to 2x faster SSD performance and starts at 1 TB of storage for M5 Pro and 2 TB for M5 Max. Apple is pairing the new silicon with an updated connectivity stack through N1, an Apple designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, which is designed to improve performance and reliability for high bandwidth wireless tasks such as large file transfers, cloud collaboration, and low latency communication.
The new MacBook Pro line is built around a Liquid Retina XDR display, which is described as gorgeous and is now available with a nano texture option to reduce glare in bright environments. It also offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a wide array of connectivity, including Thunderbolt 5; a 12MP Center Stage camera; studio quality microphones; an immersive six speaker sound system; Apple Intelligence features; and the power of macOS Tahoe. The notebooks are offered in space black and silver finishes and are available to pre order starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.
