Apple is refreshing its 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new processor. Announced this morning via press release, the entry-level MacBook Pro now features an M5 chip, faster storage, and a claimed 24 hours of battery life. The rest of the design remains the same, and the price still starts at $1,599 for a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. Preorders are available now, with availability expected on October 22nd.
Apple claims the M5 chip is 3.5x faster at AI tasks than the M4, thanks to a next-gen 10-core GPU with “a Neural Accelerator in each core.” The new GPU also means 1.6x faster graphics performance and up to 1.6x higher frame rates in games over the M4 MacBook Pro. Multithreaded performance is also increased by 20 percent, and the M5 chip in the 14-inch Pro also has higher memory bandwidth of 153Gbps (the M4 had 120Gbps). For storage, users can now choose up to a 4TB SSD — previously only available if you upgraded to the M4 Pro chip. Though, at a whopping $1,200, that upgrade costs nearly as much as the base laptop itself.
Just about everything else about the new 14-inch MacBook Pro matches the previous model. (Take a look at Apple’s own side-by-side comparison on its site.) It’s got the same ports, screen, battery, webcam, networking specs, and speakers as the M4 generation. There’s not even a new color.
That’s not such a bad thing, as last year’s base Pro laptop saw a very nice revision when it went to the M4 chip: gaining a third USB-C / Thunderbolt 4 port and the option for an anti-glare display. It proved a big quality-of-life improvement over the M3 generation before it, and became one of my personal favorites for students and content creation.
