Apple unveiled an upgraded 14-inch MacBook Pro powered by the new M5 chip on Wednesday. While the laptop looks the same as its predecessor, it sports a faster new Apple silicon processor to deliver even better performance.
“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 vice president of hardware engineering, in a press release.
M5 MacBook Pro is all about speed
The entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro typically sports the same M-series chip as the MacBook Air. But it sets itself apart with a Liquid Retina display, an active cooling system, a six-speaker sound system and other pro-level features.
With the latest refresh, Apple keeps everything intact, only switching the M4 chip with a faster M5 SoC. While the M4 introduced a big leap in performance last year, M5 takes things to new heights.
The next-generation 10-core GPU features a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each core. Apple says this helps the chip complete AI tasks 3.5 times faster than the M4. It also offers a massive 6x GPU boost over the M1.
“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,” said Ternus. “With its amazing performance, extraordinary battery life, and unrivaled display, M5 takes the new 14-inch MacBook Pro to another level.”
Faster GPU boosts AI performance
Thanks to the faster GPU, the M5 MacBook Pro will finish text-to-image-generation tasks faster and deliver better everyday AI performance. A faster 16-core Neural Engine will further help speed up processing of Apple Intelligence generative models.
The CPU gets an equally impressive leap in speed. Apple says the 10-core CPU uses the “world’s fastest CPU core” and delivers 20% faster multithreaded performance than the M4. Memory bandwidth also jumps to 150GB/s.
The speed boost extends to the SSD as well, with Apple saying it achieves two times better performance. This should drastically reduce the load times of LLMs and heavy apps and games. It’s also possible to configure the machine with up to 4TB of storage.
Even when compared to the M4 from just a year ago, Apple’s new M5 chip delivers impressive performance gains.
Other aspects of the laptop, including the 14-inch 120Hz Liquid Retina display, speakers and 12MP Center Stage camera, remain the same.
Preorder M5 MacBook Pro today
You can preorder the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip from Apple starting today. Retail availability and deliveries begin on October 22.
Despite all the improvements, the starting price of the MacBook Pro remains unchanged at $1,599. The base model comes with 16GB of system memory and 512GB of storage.
Preorder from: Apple
