Apple is continuing to announce new products ahead of its big March 4 event. Yesterday, it was the iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air. Today, it’s all about the Mac. Apple made a number of announcements: a new M5 MacBook Air, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, and new Studio Display options for anyone who wants to take out a mortgage on their external displays. All of these new products will be available preorder tomorrow, and go on sale March 11.
M5 MacBook Air
This first announcement isn’t all that exciting, but it does make sense for Apple. The company is now shipping MacBook Airs with the M5 chip, following the M5 MacBook Pro it launched in October. That doesn’t come with any real design or feature changes: These are largely the same 13 and 15-inch MacBook Airs you can buy with M4. However, you do get Apple’s latest-gen chip, which comes with performance upgrades.
M5 comes with a 10-core CPU and four “super” cores and six efficiency cores, up to a 10-core GPU, a 16-core neural engine for AI processing, and 153GB/s memory bandwidth. Apple says that M5 can process AI tasks up to four times faster than M4, and comes with 28% more memory bandwidth. While those are the direct comparisons with M4, many of Apple’s stats in its press release compare the M5 to M1, likely for two reasons. The year-over-year gains between chips aren’t huge, and, because of that, people tend to hold onto M-series Macs for a long time. Apple is likely trying to target M1 MacBook Air users who might be starting to think about an upgrade.
The biggest change aside from M5 is the starting storage amount: The M5 MacBook Air now comes with 512GB of storage in the base model, so 256GB is no longer an option. That’s good news, as the latter can run out fast, but it does mean the MacBook Air now starts at $1,099, rather than the $999 the machine has been known for. You can configure the new Airs with up to 4TB of storage, too, if you need it, though any storage you get is going to be faster than previous MacBook Airs. Apple says the new SSDs are 2x faster in regard to both read and write speeds.
The M5 chip also supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, which is an upgrade over M4’s support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Apple is shipping the new Airs with a 40W “Dynamic Power Adapter” that can charge up to 60W.
M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros
If you’re looking for the fastest MacBooks money can buy, turn your attention to the MacBook Pros. This is bigger news than the MacBook Air, as Apple already shipped products with the M5 chip. Now, the company is debuting M5 Pro and M5 Max for the first time in the new MacBook Pros—though, once again, these chips are really the only thing new about these machines.
Still, that’s a big deal, if you take Apple at its word. The company says that M5 Pro and M5 Max have the world’s fastest CPU Core (“using shipping competitive systems and select industry-standard benchmarks”), and are built using Apple’s new “Fusion Architecture.” That means these chips combine two dies on one chip, with a CPU up to 18 cores and a GPU up to 20 cores (M5 Pro) or 40 cores (M5 Max). M5 Pro can be configured with up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, while M5 Max can go up to 128GB of RAM and 8TB of storage.
What do you think so far?
The name of the game for Apple here is AI processing. The company says that M5 Pro can generate AI images 3.7 times faster than M4 Pro, and process LLM prompts 3.9 times faster. Meanwhile, M5 Max can generate AI images 3.8 times faster than M4 Max, and LLM prompt processing is four times faster. The gains are even larger when compared to M1 Pro and M1 Max, of course, which Apple highlights for similar reasons to the M5 MacBook Air: M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro owners are holding onto their laptops.
As with the M5 MacBook Air, Apple is doubling the read/write speeds of the SSDs in these MacBook Pros. The base model M5 Pro MacBook Pro now comes with a 1TB SSD, while the M5 Max comes with 2TB. It also comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support. Those upgrades come at an increased base cost, however: The 14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro now starts at $2,199, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro starts at $2,699—$200 more than before.
Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
Apple also announced refreshes to its external displays—Studio Display and Studio Display XDR. The Studio Display refresh is rather minor: It now comes with a 12MP Center Stage camera, with some image enhancements and support for Desk View—Apple’s feature that lets you show off your desk with just the webcam. It also has improved microphones and speakers, and Thunderbolt 5 support. But the display itself is much the same as the previous model, and still starts at $1,599.
If you want features like a high refresh rate 120Hz display, you’ll need to look to the Studio Display XDR. This display packs Apple’s “pro” features: It comes with a 27-inch 5K display with mini-LED, and can reach 1,000 nits of brightness (2,000 nits in HDR). Those features come at a cost, however: $3,299, to be exact.
