The Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro Gets an M5 Chip Upgrade

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-apple-14-inch-macbook-pro-gets-an-m5-chip-upgrade

Wes Davis Oct 15, 2025 · 4 mins read
The Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro Gets an M5 Chip Upgrade
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Apple surprise-announced its base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro is now available for preorder with the new M5 chip, making it the first of its laptops to get the new in-house silicon. The arrival of the chip amounts to a spec bump for the laptop, which won't be getting any other major changes. Also, the company announced M5 versions of the iPad Pro and the Vision Pro, Apple's mixed reality headset.

With an M5 chip inside, the company says this new MacBook Pro will have 1.6 times the graphics performance of its predecessor and 3.5 times the AI performance, thanks to a neural accelerator in each GPU core. The core counts are the same here as the M4, with 10 CPU and 10 GPU cores, but Apple says multithreaded performance will be about 20% faster, and notes that both SSD and memory bandwidth are bumped up. In the latter's case, the RAM has 153GB/s of throughput, a big leap over the 120GB/s of the M4 chip version. Alas, no Wi-Fi 7 – it's still got a Wi-Fi 6E chip, as before.

Apple M5 14-inch MacBook Pro announcement

The laptop comes with a base 16GB of RAM that can be bumped to 32GB, starts with 512GB of storage that can be upgraded to 4TB (you know, if you're just lousy with money), and has a 72.4Wh battery that Apple says ought to be good for up to 16 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing or 24 hours of streaming video on its 120Hz mini-LED display. (Video streaming isn't exactly a great metric to go by, but MacBook battery life has been phenomenal since the transition to Apple's custom silicon.) Founding out the specs, look for three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD Card slot, an HDMI port, MagSafe charging, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The new MacBook Pro ships with a 70W USB-C power brick, but supports faster charging with higher-wattage bricks. It's up for preorder now, starting at $1,599, and ships October 22.

Apple also bumped the iPad Pro to M5. The company makes similar performance claims here as with the new MacBook Pro, highlighting "3.5x the AI performance than iPad Pro with M4," "up to 2x faster storage read and write speeds," and 153GB/s memory bandwidth. The cellular version will get the new Apple-designed C1X chip found in the iPhone Air, as well as a Wi-Fi 7 chip, rather than Wi-Fi 6E as before. It ships in both 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, and starts at $999 for the 256GB storage version with a 9-core CPU and 10-core GPU. You can bump it to a 10-core CPU, though, if you bump storage to 1TB ($1,599) or 2TB ($1,999). Yes, Apple's storage prices are still deeply upsetting. Like the MacBook Pro, it ships on October 22.

Finally, there's the new Vision Pro – and it's not the cheaper, lighter-weight upgrade that Apple needs to make. On the contrary, this Vision Pro is actually heavier, weighing between 750–800g, depending on its light seal and band configuration. That's up from 600-650g. Just an insane change after the last two years of complaints. Apple also debuted a new Dual Knit Band that looks to be made of similar fancy elastic material to the old Solo Knit Band and should at least help wearers offset some of the pain of wearing the device. Hopefully it's up to the challenge.

Apple says bumping this machine to an M5 chip means "faster performance, sharper details throughout the system, and even more battery life." How much more? About half an hour more than its predecessor for either general use (now 2.5 hours) or video-watching (3 hours), according to the new Vision Pro's specs page. Also, the M5 chip also brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading, the ability to render 10% more pixels, and a 120Hz refresh rate, up from 100Hz on the M2-powered VIsion Pro. Those all sound like nice improvements, but with such dismal developer support less than two years into the Vision Pro's life, I'd be shocked to see enough software taking advantage of the new capabilities to make it worth upgrading from the first Vision Pro. I'd love to be proven wrong!

The new Vision Pro is available for preorder now, starting at $3,499, and ships October 22.

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.