RAM shortages and faster chips have a big impact on Apple’s next-gen laptops. On Tuesday, the iGiant unveiled its M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and M5 Airs alongside steep price hikes across the lineup.
Apple’s refreshed MacBook Pros now start at $2,199 for the 14-inch and $2,699 for the larger 16-inch model, $200 higher than the M4 Pro equivalents. M5 MacBook Air starting prices, meanwhile, are up $100 to $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch version.
Memory prices have surged over the past few months amid a shortage of DRAM and NAND flash blamed squarely on the AI boom.
To make its higher starting prices more palatable, Apple has doubled the onboard storage with the M5 Pro complemented by 1 TB of flash and the Max variant shipping with 2 TB on board. The MacBook Air’s capacity has also been doubled to 512 GB.
On one hand, this means Apple’s M5 Pro and Max Mac cost about the same as a similarly-specced M4 system. On the other hand, Apple’s storage and memory prices are notoriously high, and despite skyrocketing memory prices, Apple probably isn’t paying an extra $200 to add another 512 GB of storage to the board. As we recently reported, NAND flash prices are hovering at around $0.2 per gigabyte. Instead, Apple appears to be trying to offset higher DRAM costs while making customers feel like they’re still getting a good deal.
Apple’s most advanced M-series silicon yet
The new chips now feature a heterogeneous multi-die design that pairs a CPU compute die with up to 18 cores with a GPU die that has up to 40 cores.
Apple has used multiple dies in some M-series silicon, like the M1 Ultra, but those dies were essentially identical. In this respect, Apple’s latest silicon is more akin to Intel and AMD’s latest generation of high-end mobile processors.
Much like past M-series silicon, those CPU cores are configured in a big-little arrangement. Rather than the traditional performance-and-efficiency split, Apple brands its fastest cores as “super” cores across M5, while M5 Pro and M5 Max add an all-new performance core optimized for multithreaded workloads.
Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max can be had with up to 6 super and 12 performance cores. As we understand it, Apple hasn’t simply rebranded its efficiency cores; the performance core appears to be a frequency-optimized variant of the super core tuned for multithreaded workloads. These performance cores are only found on the M5 Pro and Max. Apple advertises the standard M5 as having four super cores and six efficiency cores.
Apple wouldn’t be the first to embrace a big / slightly-less-big core architecture, which one could argue is still a big / little arrangement. Qualcomm’s X2 Elite processors, announced back in September, now feature up to 12 of what it calls Prime cores and 6 performance cores.
Turning to the GPU, the M5 Pro can be had with up to 20 graphics cores, twice that of the standard M5, while the M5 Max tops out at 40 cores.
Apple is particularly proud of its latest GPUs, which now feature an integrated neural accelerator — what Nvidia calls a tensor core — that promises significant gains for matrix multiplication operations.
This mostly benefits AI applications running on the GPU, something Apple is making a big deal about. Cupertino boasts that its top-specced part is now up to 3.8x faster than last gen for image generation and 4x faster for large language model (LLM) prompt processing.
We’ll note that LLM token generation – the speed at which a model produces a response – is often limited by memory bandwidth, which rises about 12 percent this generation to 307 GB/s on M5 Pro and 614 GB/s on M5 Max.
For workloads that aren’t AI-related, Apple says M5 Pro delivers up to 1.4x faster performance than M4 Pro in Maxon’s Redshift renderer and up to 1.6x faster gaming performance in ray-traced titles such as Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition.
Refreshed MacBooks
For now, the M5 Pro and Max are only available in Apple’s MacBook Pro chassis. This design hasn’t changed much since the original M1 Pro and Max were released in late 2021.
The systems feature the same 14 or 16-inch Liquid Retina displays with up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness and up to 1,000 nits for regular content. The notebook’s I/O also remains unchanged with three Thunderbolt 5 ports, a full-sized HDMI, and an SDXC card slot.
According to Apple, you can expect battery life to be slightly better on the refreshed MacBook Pros, which can now last up to 24 hours. Of course, real world battery life is going to depend heavily on applications and workflow.
It’s a similar story with the M5 MacBook Air, which uses the same chassis as last-gen and can be had with either a 13 or 15-inch display good for 500 nits of brightness. We’ll also note that while the MacBook Pros get Thunderbolt 5, the Air (and the base M5 MacBook Pro) is slumming it with older Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Perhaps the biggest change to these devices, besides the refreshed M-series silicon, is the introduction of Apple’s N1 network chip, which brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity to the platforms.
Apple’s refreshed MacBooks are available for pre-order starting on March 4 with general availability set for March 11. ®