Day two of March’s Apple product extravaganza, uh, marches on with the announcement of MacBook Pro models bearing new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, updated wireless capabilities, and both more and faster storage.
These models join the base level M5 MacBook Pro, released last fall, but offer more power, starting with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU on the M5 Pro model, 24GB of RAM, and a 1TB of SSD storage. The M5 Max-equipped MacBook, meanwhile, starts at 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, and 36GB of RAM, with 2TB of storage. That’s double the storage for both models over their counterparts for last year, and Apple says the SSDs are twice as fast as well.
But the M5 Pro and Max are undoubtedly the stars of the show. Like the M5 chips we’ve seen so far, they feature a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator. But Apple says they also use an all new Fusion Architecture, which connects two 3-nm dies on a single SoC that bundles CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and more.
In their base configuration, they each feature what Apple is now branding “super” cores, alongside performance cores. This is perhaps a bit of nominative legerdemain—Apple says the super core is the same core that exists in all M5 products, and will retroactively rebrand them as such. It’s unclear whether the performance cores are then the equivalent of the M4’s efficiency cores, but they are set to be optimized for power efficiency.
Wirelessly, the new models are powered Apple’s N1 chip, bringing support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 across the line, like the new M4 iPad Air and iPhone 17e introduced earlier this week.
There are a handful of other improvements: the microphones add Voice Isolation and Wide Spectrum modes, and the M5 Pro MacBook Pro is now configurable with up to 64GB of memory. The 16-inch M5 Max gets slightly better battery life—up to 16 hours of wireless web browsing, compared to 14 hours on its M4 predecessor, and 22 hours of video streaming, compared to 21 hours. The 14-inch M5 Max ekes out two additional hours of video streaming, up to 20 hours.
The 14-inch M5 Pro starts at $2199, while the 16-inch stats at $2699; the 14-inch M5 Max model starts at $3599, with its 16-inch counterpart at $3899. All models will be available for pre-order on March 4, and will start shipping on March 11.
