The first M5 Mac laptop is here – almost exactly five years after Apple announced its move to Apple Silicon with the M1 chip.
The Apple’s 14in MacBook Pro has been upgraded to the M5 like the iPad Pro and Vision Pro, but there are no M5 Pro or M5 Max versions yet. Instead, it looks like you’ll have to wait until the spring if you want one of the more powerful models – Apple didn’t do this with the M4 lineup, announcing all three variants at the same time a year ago.
There are rumours of MacBook Pro redesign, but it sounds like that would be a next-generation move. And as usual with Apple, if the current design is selling well, there’s no need to move things on externally.
The advent of the M5 version of the Pro isn’t a surprise – Apple itself teased it yesterday following on from a Russian YouTuber seemingly getting hold of the new model a couple of weeks back (he previously also leaked the M4 version).
The M5 chip boasts a 10-core CPU with four performance cores and six efficiency cores plus there’s a 10-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. Neural Accelerators have been used on the graphics chip to enhance AI work, just as on the A19 Pro chip inside the iPhone Air, 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max.
Apple is claiming 3.5 times faster AI performance than M4, and up to six times faster than the half-decade old M1. The processor performance is also up 20% over M4 for multi-core tasks with graphics performance 1.6 times improved on average. There’s also more unified memory bandwidth at over 150GB/s.
Once again battery life is quoted at 24 hours, so I’d think you could expect around 16-18 hours of real world use. We’ll put that to the test in an upcoming review.
Again the MacBook Pro 14in with M5 starts at $1599/£1599 and is available to pre-order today and full sale will be from 22 October.
