Alongside its price-friendly iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air yesterday, Apple just announced a few updates to the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and its rarely-refreshed desktop display line. Apple seems to be holding its rumored new entry-level MacBook for tomorrow’s in-person event in New York City, but today’s announcements should make potential upgraders happy.
The MacBook Air has now been updated to the latest M5 chip. It’s a fairly modest upgrade, but it brings it up to speed with Apple’s latest processor that debuted in the MacBook Pro last fall. There are no other major hardware changes—it now comes with 512 GB of starting storage with “faster SSD technology”—but you can still get the Air in either a 13- or 15-inch screen size.
This laptop also features Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which includes Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for the latest connectivity standards. It still comes with the standard 16 GB of RAM, and sadly, there’s a $100 price bump to account for the extra storage. It now starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch model. Apple says you can preorder it tomorrow, with sales kicking off on March 11.
More interestingly, Apple is expanding the M5 chip series with the M5 Pro and M5 Max, now available in the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Like previous generations of Apple silicon, the “Pro” and “Max” configurations add significantly improved multi-core CPU and graphics performance.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max can be configured with up to 18 CPU cores (12 performance cores and 6 “super” cores), up from 16 on the M4 Max. The M5 Pro can scale up to 20 GPU cores, while the M5 Max extends up to 40 GPU cores. Thanks to the four additional CPU cores, Apple says the M5 Pro gets 30 percent better multithreaded CPU performance over the M4 Pro. With four additional CPU cores compared to M4 Pro, the new CPU architecture in M5 Pro significantly boosts multithreaded performance by up to 30 percent for pro workloads. The M5 Max CPU upgrade is a bit more modest by comparison—just 15 percent over the M4 Max, according to Apple.
Thanks to higher memory bandwidth, more efficient Neural Engine, and improved GPU architecture, Apple says both the M5 Pro and M5 Max have “over 4X the peak CPU compute for AI” compared to the last generation and offer 20 percent better GPU performance.
The new MacBook Pros don’t include any other hardware changes; things have stayed largely the same since 2021—same port selection, Mini-LED display, speakers, and webcam. Even the claimed 24-hour battery life hasn’t changed from the M4 models, which came out in late 2024. Interestingly, as recently as last week, Bloomberg reported that Apple plans to launch a more significant update to the MacBook Pro later this fall, which will reportedly debut the M6 chip, an OLED touchscreen, and a thinner chassis.
