Apple’s Next-Gen M5 Chip Debuts in a New 14-Inch MacBook Pro
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As anticipated, Apple just unveiled a flurry of new products to showcase its latest silicon: the M5 chip. While it wasn’t clear exactly how we’d be seeing these, the company decided to go with a rapid-fire series of press releases on its Newsroom site rather than spreading things out.
That echoes what it did with new iPad and Apple TV releases in 2022, which all landed in the middle of October in the same way. However, it also contrasts with last year’s “Week of Mac,” when Apple announced three new M4-powered Macs over three days, each accompanied by a short “mini-event” video.
While today’s set of press releases simultaneously unveils the M5 MacBook Pro, M5 iPad Pro, and M5 Vision Pro, it’s the Mac where Apple silicon’s power really shines — and that’s especially true given the chip is the only change this year. It’s also a subtle but telling shift in Apple’s hardware strategy, which brings us to the new M5 MacBook Pro.
The M5 MacBook Pro
First off, Apple has also returned to its early Apple silicon playbook, pushing out the base M5 chip ahead of its more powerful Pro and Max counterparts. That was the norm with the M1 and M2 generations, which debuted in the MacBook Air and an old-school 13-inch MacBook Pro that had retained its Intel-era design. In 2023, Apple decided to bring that entry-level model into the rest of the family, giving it the new 14-inch MacBook Pro design. At the same time, it released the full suite of M3 chips during an October event, and then repeated that again for the M4 family last year.
However, this year marks a return to the older format. Today’s release is solely for the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro. The more powerful 14-inch and 16-inch M5 Pro and M5 Max models are still waiting in the wings and likely won’t arrive until early next year.
It’s not an entirely unprecedented shift from Apple’s M4 chip strategy, which also debuted earlier than its Pro/Max counterparts last year. The only difference is that Apple chose to unveil the M4 exclusively in an iPad, saving the 14-inch MacBook Pro version until it had the full MacBook lineup ready. This year, it’s clearly decided to give the M5 chip to three new devices at the same time — including the Vision Pro. Only the iMac and Mac mini are missing from the M5 party today; those may come early next year, or they may skip the M5 chip entirely, as both have already done so in the past.
Apple reportedly has big plans for its MacBook Pro lineup in next year’s model. If the rumors are true, the M6 MacBook Pro will switch to an OLED panel and get much thinner. For now, however, the M5 MacBook Pro is identical to its M4 predecessor in every way except for the chip inside and the availability of a new 4 TB SSD configuration.
The M5 Chip
Apple issued a separate press release for the M5 chip and the M5 MacBook Pro. We’ll give kudos to its copywriters for making them unique, but they’re essentially two different angles on the M5 chip’s capabilities.
After all, the M5 is the only improvement in the M5 MacBook Pro. That’s still a meaningful upgrade, but there’s little to say about the new MacBook beyond the performance gains from the chip inside. Here’s what’s changed — and what hasn’t — in the M5 chip’s specs.
The most notable improvements are in GPU performance, and they’re surprisingly impressive. Apple says the M5 can deliver over four times the peak GPU compute performance in AI and machine-learning workloads when compared to the M4, thanks to adding a Neural Accelerator to each GPU — the same technique introduced in the iPhone’s A18 Pro chip last month.
This is the kind of power that will matter for folks who work with AI workflows, like text-to-image generation and large language models (LLMs). Naturally, the CPU and 16-core Neural Engine have also gained a performance boost, and Apple has doubled SSD speeds.
However, the gains are more modest once you step back from AI tasks. Overall graphics performance has only increased by 1.6x over the M4, but it’s still only packing a 10-core GPU; it’s just that the individual cores are faster and the new Neural Accelerators give it an extra boost. Ditto for the 10-core CPU, which remains split between 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores.
Although some had hoped the M5 chip would bring Thunderbolt 5 support to the entry-level MacBook Pro, that didn’t happen. The M5 offers the same three Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C ports as the previous model. Thunderbolt 5 remains the exclusive domain of the higher-end Pro/Max models.
The most significant change in the M5, other than the GPU’s Neural Accelerators, is faster memory bandwidth, which now offers 153 GB/s of throughput, compared to 120 GB/s on the M4. While Apple still boasts excellent battery life for the M5 MacBook Pro, that also remains unchanged from its predecessor.
“MacBook Pro continues to be the world’s best pro laptop, and today, the 14-inch MacBook Pro gets even better with the arrival of the M5 chip,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior VP of Hardware Engineering. “M5 marks the next big leap in AI for the Mac and delivers a huge boost in graphics performance, accelerating demanding workflows for everyone from students to creatives, developers to business professionals, and more. With its amazing performance, extraordinary battery life, and unrivaled display, M5 takes the new 14-inch MacBook Pro to another level.”
It’s telling that the most impressive benchmarks for the M5 MacBook Pro are against the 2020 13-inch M1 model. That’s not to say there aren’t performance increases over the M4, but Apple likely recognizes that not too many folks are buying a new MacBook Pro every year. In fact, it continues to emphasize how much of a “breakthrough” the new MacBook is “for M1 and Intel-based upgraders.”
Price and Availability
The new M5 MacBook Pro starts at the same $1,599 as last year’s M4 version, which gets you a base configuration with 16 GB of unified memory and a 512 GB SSD, and the good news is that nothing appears to be binned here: you’re getting the same 10-core CPU and GPU configurations found in the pricier versions, which allow for 24 GB and 32 GB memory upgrades, and storage up to 4 TB — the one other improvement over the M4 version, which capped out at 2 TB.
The new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro is available for preorder today from Apple’s online store in the US and 29 other countries or regions. It’s available in space black and silver and expected to land in Apple Stores next Wednesday, October 22.
