Apple often releases a smaller second wave of new products in October after the dust settles from its September iPhone announcement, and this year that wave revolves around its brand-new M5 chip. The first Mac to get the new processor will be the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, which the company announced today on its press site alongside a new M5 iPad Pro and an updated version of the Vision Pro headset.
But unlike the last couple MacBook Pro refreshes, Apple isn't ready with Pro and Max versions of the M5 for higher-end 14-inch MacBook Pros and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Those models will continue to use the M4 Pro and M4 Max for now, and we probably shouldn't expect an update for them until sometime next year.
Aside from the M5, the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro has essentially identical specs to the outgoing M4 version. It has a notched 14-inch screen with ProMotion support and a 3024×1964 resolution, three USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, and a 12 MP Center Stage webcam. It still weighs 3.4 pounds, and Apple still estimates the battery should last for "up to 16 hours" of wireless web browsing and up to 24 hours of video streaming. The main internal difference is an option for a 4TB storage upgrade, which will run you $1,200 if you're upgrading from the base 512GB SSD.
The M5 also isn't a huge departure from the M4. It uses four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine, and it can be configured with either 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB of RAM. These are all the same numbers and core counts as the M4.
The chip's biggest upgrade is a leap in memory bandwidth, from 120GB/s for the M4 to 153GB/s for the M5. Integrated GPUs usually respond well to increases in memory bandwidth—using a pool of slower system RAM rather than fast, dedicated graphics RAM is one of these GPUs' biggest performance limiters—so that bump in memory bandwidth helps contribute to a 45 percent increase in GPU performance relative to the M4. Apple also says that the GPU "includes a Neural Accelerator in each core," which it says improves the performance of GPU-based AI workloads by up to 400 percent.
The new MacBook Pro totally replaces the M4 version of the laptop. It starts at $1,599 for a configuration with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, is available for pre-order today, and ships on October 22.
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