Apple

Testing Apple’s 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new “performance” cores

Apple, Apple M5, apple m5 max, apple m5 pro, Apple silicon, Tech / Mike M. / March 9, 2026

M5 Pro Max’s “performance” CPU cores definitely aren’t just rebranded E-cores.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Apple M5 Max chip inside. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max make deceptively large changes to how Apple’s high-end laptop and desktop chips are built.

We’ve already covered those changes in some depth, but in essence: The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an “all-new Fusion Architecture” like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon. These two dies are then packaged together into one chip.

M5 Pro and M5 Max both use the same 18-core CPU die, but Pro uses a 20-core GPU die, and Max gets a 40-core GPU die. (Because the memory controller is also part of the GPU die, the Max chip still offers more memory bandwidth and supports higher memory configurations than the Pro one does.)

The other big change is that neither of these chips uses Apple’s “efficiency” CPU cores anymore. All of the M5 family’s large high-performance cores are now called “super” cores as of macOS 26.3.1, including the ones that originally launched as “performance” cores in the regular M5 last fall. The standard M5 still has smaller, slower efficiency cores, but M5 Pro and M5 Max use a third kind of CPU core instead, confusingly also called “performance” cores.

	Fastest cores	“Medium” cores	Efficiency cores	GPU cores	Memory bandwidth
M5 Max	Up to 6 (“super”)	Up to 12 (“performance”)	0	Up to 40	Up to 614 GB/s
M5 Pro	Up to 6 (“super”)	Up to 12 (“performance”)	0	Up to 20	307 GB/s MHz
M5	4 (“super”)	0	6	Up to 10	153 GB/s
M4 Max	Up to 12 (“performance”)	0	4	Up to 40	Up to 546 GB/s
M5	Up to 10 (“performance”)	0	4	Up to 20	273 GB/s
M4	4 (“performance”)	0	6	Up to 10	120 GB/s

Users will experience the M5 Pro and M5 Max mostly as the expected iterative upgrades over last-generation chips, the same thing delivered by most new Apple Silicon processor generations. But for the technically inclined, it’s worth digging a little deeper into the M5 Max, both to learn why it performs the way it does and to dispel confusion about what’s being rebranded (the new “super” cores), and what’s actually different (the new “performance” cores in M5 Pro and M5 Max, which definitely aren’t just rebranded efficiency cores).

If you’re interested in a slightly wider-ranging review of the new MacBook Pros, I’ll point you toward reviews of the M1, M3, and M4 generation models, as well as the one for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with the standard M5 (now $100 more expensive than it was before, but with 1TB of base storage instead of 512GB).

Apple is using the same external design for these laptops that it has been using since 2021—it’s aging pretty well, and we still mostly like it, especially compared to late-Intel-era MacBook Pros. There’s just not much else to say about the design that hasn’t been said.

M5 Max benchmarks

In our testing, the fully enabled M5 Max’s single-core performance is about 10 percent higher than the fully enabled version of the M4 Max in last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. The multi-core performance improvements are more variable (Cinebench R23, which shows a 30 percent improvement, seems to be an outlier), but most tests also show a modest 10 or 12 percent improvement.

Graphics performance improvements are slightly more robust, measuring between 20 and 35 percent depending on the test. Apple suggests you may see more uplift on GPU compute workloads that can leverage the neural accelerator Apple has built into each M5-family GPU core.

The jump from the M4 Max to the M5 Max isn’t quite as large, expressed as a percentage, as it has been for the last couple generations; both M3 Max and M4 Max were big leaps from what had come before. But assuming you’re upgrading from an M1 or M2-based Pro, you’ll still be taking a big leap. Fears that stepping down from 12 of Apple’s best-performing CPU cores (in M4 Max) to just six of the best-performing cores are also a bit overblown, based on these results.

Compared to the basic M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5 Max’s single-core performance is roughly the same, which is in keeping with how Apple usually does things—stepping up to higher-end chips gets you better multi-core and graphics performance, but Apple doesn’t push the clock speeds upward on the individual cores the way that Intel or AMD do with their higher-end processors.

Multi-core performance increases between 66 percent (Geekbench) and 120 percent (Cinebench R23)—for sustained heavy workloads, an 18-core M5 Pro or M5 Max ought to be just about twice as fast as the M5, give or take. And jumping from the M5’s 10 GPU cores to the M5 Max’s 40 cores typically gets you between three and four times the graphics performance.

Measuring the M5 Max’s CPU power consumption with the powermetrics command-line tool, average power consumption during our Handbrake video encoding test is about 23 percent higher than M4 Max, and because of that increase, the chip uses just a bit more energy overall to do the same work. We observed a similar increase when comparing the M4 to the M5. But overall, power efficiency is roughly in line with past Apple Silicon generations.

While Apple only sent us an M5 Max-equipped MacBook Pro to test, for most CPU-based tasks, the M5 Pro should perform similarly. That’s because both chips are using the exact same silicon die for the CPU cores, Neural Engine, Thunderbolt and display controllers, and SSD controller. It’s the GPU die that separates the Pro from the Max; the Pro has up to 20 GPU cores and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and the Max has up to 40 GPU cores and up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth (these are two totally different GPUs—the Max GPU isn’t just two Pro GPUs joined together with the Fusion Architecture).

M5 Max under the hood: Definitely not efficiency cores

The whole “performance cores are now super cores in all M5 chips” thing has created a lot of confusion around the non-Super cores. The M5 Pro and M5 Max come with six super cores and 12 of what Apple is now calling “performance” cores, but are those just efficiency cores that have been rebranded to create the impression of higher speeds?

Apple has said publicly that these new performance cores are “all-new” and “optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads,” and we’re told that the performance cores are new designs that are derived from the super core. There’s precedent for this; AMD ships functionally identical but physically smaller, lower-clocked Zen 4c and Zen 5c cores in many of its laptop CPUs, rather than using different core designs for the big and little cores (as Intel still does, and as Apple has likely been doing up till now).

I can’t speak to the actual low-level architecture of each type of CPU core, but using both powermetrics and the sysctl command, we can confirm that these aren’t just rebranded efficiency cores. The new performance cores have more L2 cache than the M5’s efficiency cores and run at much higher peak clock speeds.

	L1 instruction cache	L1 data cache	L2 cache	Minimum clock	Maximum clock
M5/M5 Pro/M5 Max super core	192KB	128KB	16MB per cluster	1,308 MHz	4,608 MHz
M5 Pro/M5 Max performance core	128KB	64KB	8MB per cluster	1,344 MHz	4,308 MHz
M5 efficiency core	128KB	64KB	6MB per cluster	972 MHz	3,048 MHz

The new non-super performance cores have the same L1 cache sizes as Apple’s E-cores, but slightly more L2 cache per 6-core cluster and much higher minimum and maximum clock speeds. At about 4.3 GHz, the M5 Max’s performance cores come in only 300 MHz lower than the super cores’ 4.6 GHz peak.

We can also report that the powermetrics tool uses new under-the-hood nomenclature for reporting data about these performance cores. Powermetrics still refers to the cluster of super cores as the “P-cluster,” and the M5’s E-cores are still referred to as the “E-cluster.” But the new performance core clusters are labeled “M0 cluster” and “M1 cluster.” (M for Middle, maybe? Medium? It’s very likely that Apple started working on these core designs before it decided what their public-facing name should be.)

What I can’t say is whether macOS treats these new performance cores any differently than it would treat the E-cores. From the operating system’s perspective, you still have one group of CPU cores that runs at high speeds and one group that runs at lower speeds, and my guess would be that anything that would be directed at an E-core in the M5 or an older Mac will simply be directed to the performance cores in an M5 Pro or M5 Max system. But it’s totally possible that M5 Pro or M5 Max systems could assign tasks to different CPU cores slightly differently, since the performance gap between the “big” and “little” cores isn’t as large.

Finally, let’s look at how the M5 Max’s CPU cores perform under the sustained heavy load of our Handbrake video encoding test.

Clock speed measurements for the “super” clusters on M5 and M5 Max during our CPU-based Handbrake video encoding test, which uses all CPU cores in a system at once.

Observe the standard Apple M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The M5’s four super cores maintain a peak multi-core clock speed of 4.24 GHz for a bit less than a minute, then fall slightly to a clock speed closer to 4.1 GHz, and ramp down further to about 4.0 GHz for the last stretch of the test. (Note that the fanless version of the M5 in the MacBook Air starts lower, drops off faster, and settles down to a sustained clock speed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 GHz.)

The standard M5’s E-cores also run at fairly consistent speeds of around 3 GHz throughout the test, with some peaks and valleys but little sign of any performance throttling.

Now look at the lines for the M5 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The 6-core supercluster maintains its maximum clock speed for just a few seconds, quickly dropping down to a sustained clock speed of around 3.9 GHz (with periodic dips as low as 3.4 GHz). There are two extra cores in the M5 Max’s super cluster, so slightly lower sustained clock speeds are to be expected.

But those performance cores are where a lot of M5 Max’s multi-core speed is coming from. In terms of clock speed, the two performance core clusters behave more like efficiency cores, insofar as they maintain a fairly stable clock speed without significant performance throttling. But these cores are running between 4.3 and 4.2 GHz rather than 3 GHz; even without other architectural changes, that means that these performance cores are going to run things quite a bit faster than the efficiency cores do.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Testing Apple’s 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new “performance” cores Read More »

Apple’s 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

Apple, Apple silicon, m3 ultra, m4 max, Mac Studio, ram shortage, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 7, 2026

If the only thing you had to go off was Apple’s string of product announcements this week, you’d have little reason to believe that there is a historic AI-driven memory and storage supply crunch going on. Some products saw RAM and storage increases at the same prices as the products they replaced; others had their prices increased a bit but came with more storage than before as compensation. And there’s the MacBook Neo, which at $599 was priced toward the low end of what Apple-watchers expected.

But even a company with Apple’s scale and buying power can’t totally defy gravity. At some point between March 4 and now, Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM option from its top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio desktop. Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000. The Tech Specs page on Apple’s support site still acknowledges the existence of the 512GB configuration, but both the Apple Store page and the list of available configurations have removed any mention of it.

We’ve asked Apple to comment on the disappearance of the 512GB Mac Studio and will update this article if we receive a response.

It’s rare for Apple to pull any configurations of products it sells, aside from removing higher-capacity storage options for older iPhones after new ones come out. More commonly, the company will just increase its shipping estimates to reflect the supply chain backlog.

The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499.

Apple’s 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage Read More »

Feds take notice of iOS vulnerabilities exploited under mysterious circumstances

Apple, Biz & IT, exploits, iOS, iPhones, Security, vulnerabilities / Mike M. / March 6, 2026

Coruna is also notable for its use by three distinct hacking groups. Google first detected its use in February of last year in an operation conducted by a “customer of a surveillance vendor.” The vulnerability exploited, tracked as CVE-2025-23222, had been patched 13 months earlier. In July 2025, a “suspected Russian espionage group” exploited CVE-2023-43000 in attacks planted on websites that were frequented by Ukrainian targets. Last December, when it was used by a “financially motivated threat actor from China,” Google was able to retrieve the complete exploit kit.

“How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for ‘second hand’ zero-day exploits,” Google wrote. “Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.”

Google researchers went on to write:

We retrieved all the obfuscated exploits, including ending payloads. Upon further analysis, we noticed an instance where the actor deployed the debug version of the exploit kit, leaving in the clear all of the exploits, including their internal code names. That’s when we learned that the exploit kit was likely named Coruna internally. In total, we collected a few hundred samples covering a total of five full iOS exploit chains. The exploit kit is able to target various iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023).

The 23 exploits, along with the code names and other information, are:

Type	Codename	Targeted versions (inclusive)	Fixed versions	CVE
WebContent R/W	buffout	13 → 15.1.1	15.2	CVE-2021-30952
WebContent R/W	jacurutu	15.2 → 15.5	15.6	CVE-2022-48503
WebContent R/W	bluebird	15.6 → 16.1.2	16.2	No CVE
WebContent R/W	terrorbird	16.2 → 16.5.1	16.6	CVE-2023-43000
WebContent R/W	cassowary	16.6 → 17.2.1	16.7.5, 17.3	CVE-2024-23222
WebContent PAC bypass	breezy	13 → 14.x	?	No CVE
WebContent PAC bypass	breezy15	15 → 16.2	?	No CVE
WebContent PAC bypass	seedbell	16.3 → 16.5.1	?	No CVE
WebContent PAC bypass	seedbell_16_6	16.6 → 16.7.12	?	No CVE
WebContent PAC bypass	seedbell_17	17 → 17.2.1	?	No CVE
WebContent sandbox escape	IronLoader	16.0 → 16.3.116.4.0 (<= A12)	15.7.8, 16.5	CVE-2023-32409
WebContent sandbox escape	NeuronLoader	16.4.0 → 16.6.1 (A13-A16)	17.0	No CVE
PE	Neutron	13.X	14.2	CVE-2020-27932
PE (infoleak)	Dynamo	13.X	14.2	CVE-2020-27950
PE	Pendulum	14 → 14.4.x	14.7	No CVE
PE	Photon	14.5 → 15.7.6	15.7.7, 16.5.1	CVE-2023-32434
PE	Parallax	16.4 → 16.7	17.0	CVE-2023-41974
PE	Gruber	15.2 → 17.2.1	16.7.6, 17.3	No CVE
PPL Bypass	Quark	13.X	14.5	No CVE
PPL Bypass	Gallium	14.x	15.7.8, 16.6	CVE-2023-38606
PPL Bypass	Carbone	15.0 → 16.7.6	17.0	No CVE
PPL Bypass	Sparrow	17.0 → 17.3	16.7.6, 17.4	CVE-2024-23225
PPL Bypass	Rocket	17.1 → 17.4	16.7.8, 17.5	CVE-2024-23296

CISA is adding only three of the CVEs to its catalog. They are:

CVE-2021-30952 Apple Multiple Products Integer Overflow or Wraparound Vulnerability
CVE-2023-41974 Apple iOS and iPadOS Use-After-Free Vulnerability
CVE-2023-43000 Apple Multiple products Use-After-Free Vulnerability

CISA is directing agencies to “apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable… guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.” The agency went on to warn: “These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise.”

Feds take notice of iOS vulnerabilities exploited under mysterious circumstances Read More »

Apple users in the US can no longer download ByteDance’s Chinese apps

Apple, bytedance, china, Policy, syndication, tiktok / Mike M. / March 6, 2026

In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.

The exact mechanism Apple uses to enable geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, assistant professor of law at Tilburg University who has studied the effect of EU regulations on Apple. “Presumably, there’s some on-device processing saying, ‘Look, this phone is somewhere in the EU borders, so you get an eligibility green check mark.’” And if the device detects that an EU resident leaves the region for more than 90 days, according to Apple’s policy, that eligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen says.

The new restriction on ByteDance apps in the US resembles the EU-specific geographical restrictions that were previously reported. Some ByteDance users have said that they are able to circumvent the restrictions by using virtual private networks, which allow people to spoof their device’s location, but the work-arounds aren’t foolproof.

“Apple may use the IP address of your Internet connection to approximate your location in order to determine whether certain apps that are subject to legal restrictions in some regions can be made available to you,” the App Store’s legal terms explicitly state. But according to online archives of the terms page, this specific sentence was added at the end of January 2025, shortly after the company first removed ByteDance apps from the US version of the App Store.

So far, there’ve been few instances of Apple actually implementing technical capabilities to geoblock users. “However, you could think about this having some wider spillover effects if this becomes the more general way of ensuring that apps that shouldn’t be available indeed aren’t available,” Bostoen says. “If Apple gets more sophisticated about blocking access in a way that cannot simply be circumvented with a VPN, obviously citizens in those places are now left with much less liberty.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Apple users in the US can no longer download ByteDance’s Chinese apps Read More »

MacBook Neo hands-on: Apple build quality at a substantially lower price

Apple, Apple A18 Pro, Apple silicon, Mac, macbook neo, Tech / Beth Washington / March 4, 2026

The Neo won’t be for everyone, but Apple has managed to preserve a premium feel.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

NEW YORK CITY—Whether you’re talking about the iBook, MacBook, or MacBook Air, Apple’s most basic laptops have started at or within $100 of the $1,000 price point for over 20 years. Sure, the company had quietly been testing the waters with a Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air configuration for several years, first at $699 and then at $599. But as far as what Apple would actively advertise and offer on its own site and in its own retail stores, we’ve never seen anything for substantially below $1,000.

The new MacBook Neo changes that. Apple has experimented with lower-cost products before, most notably with the $329 and $349 iPads and the old $429 iPhone SE. But this is the first time it has used that strategy for the Mac. The Neo starts at $599 for a version with 256GB of storage and no Touch ID sensor, and $699 for a version with Touch ID and 512GB of storage (each also available to educational customers for $100 less).

We had a chance to poke at a MacBook Neo for a while at Apple’s “special experience” event in New York this morning, and what I can tell you is that this does feel like an Apple laptop despite the lower starting price. It definitely has some spec sheet shortcomings, even compared to older M3 or M4 MacBook Airs that you still might be able to get at a discount from third-party retailers or Apple’s refurbished site—more on that in our full review next week. But it’s priced low enough to (1) appeal to people who might not have considered a Mac before, and (2) to make some of its borderline specs feel reasonable, and that’s enough to keep it interesting.

MacBook Air-ish

I had assumed, based on Apple’s history with its lower-end iPads and iPhones, that Apple would essentially reuse the design of the old M1 MacBook Air for this new MacBook. The Neo does share quite a few things in common with that older design, including a 13-inch notchless display, a 2.7 lb weight, and a lack of MagSafe connector. But this is actually a new design after all, one that’s more in line with the current Pro and Air iterations.

The Neo is a flat rectangular slab of aluminum with softly rounded edges, more like the current Airs and Pros than the wedge-shaped design of the old M1 Air (also like modern Airs, the words “MacBook Neo” appear nowhere on the exterior of the computer—the name only exists in stores and in software).

The low-end iPad can feel a bit cheap or hollow, partly because of the small gap between the front glass and the non-laminated LCD display underneath. But holding and interacting with the Neo feels substantially the same as interacting with an Air. It is, however, slightly thicker—an even 0.5 inches, up from 0.44 inches for the M4 Air.

The non-backlit keyboard is a bit of a bummer, although Apple has tried to keep it legible by shifting from white-on-black keycaps to darker legends on a lighter background. But the typing feel is similar to the Air, and we’re told the scissor switches have the same amount of key travel as the switches in the Air keyboards.

The multi-touch trackpad is a little weirder. It looks a lot like Apple’s other trackpads, but it actually has a physical clicking mechanism rather than the haptic feedback Apple has used in its laptop trackpads and Magic Trackpads for years. That means there’s no Force Click functionality and no controls for adjusting the firmness or noisiness of the clicking sensation.

Apple did, at least, figure out a mechanism that makes it feel the same to click anywhere on the trackpad. More traditional physical trackpads, including the ones Apple used to use, had a hinge toward the top of the trackpad that made clicking up there feel stiffer and firmer than clicking at the bottom or in the middle of the trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel quite as solid, probably because of the space left to make room for a physical clicking mechanism, but, aside from the missing haptics, it seems to work just as well as Apple’s other trackpads.

The laptop’s ports may cause some confusion, for the same reason that any USB-C or Thunderbolt port can cause confusion—the ports look the same but do different things. Either of the laptop’s two USB-C ports can charge the laptop. But only the rear one supports 10 Gbps USB 3 transfer speeds, and it’s also the only one that can drive a display (one 4K screen at up to 60 Hz, down from two higher-resolution external displays for the Air). The port toward the front only supports 480 Mbps USB 2.0 transfer speeds, enough for a keyboard and many other external accessories, but not ideal for external storage.

Neither port is marked in any way, though macOS will apparently alert users if they try to plug something into the USB 2.0 port that won’t work with it.

The four colors of Neo: the pink-ish Blush, blue-tinted Indigo, yellowy Citrus, and traditional MacBook silver. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The internal display is great for the price, though it falls a bit short of both the current Airs and the M1 Air. The 13-inch 2408×1506 IPS LCD screen is just shy of the old M1 Air’s resolution, and it supports both 500 nits of maximum brightness and full coverage of the sRGB color gamut, both relatively rare in similarly priced PCs. But it’s missing DCI-P3 wide color support and the True Tone feature that subtly adjusts the color temperature of the display based on ambient lighting, two things that were still supported by the old M1 Air.

The biggest sticking point for many buyers will be the processor, an Apple A18 Pro that first appeared in the iPhone 16 Pro.

This chip includes six CPU cores (two performance, four efficiency) and a five-core GPU, which worked just fine under casual use in the hands-on area and in our briefing. We saw it running Safari with multiple tabs open, playing a game, and running Pixelmator Pro, and it handled all three tasks well. But the higher-end apps that aren’t bottlenecked by the CPU or GPU may be bottlenecked by its 8GB of RAM instead.

We’ll do more testing in our review to figure out where people will notice the specs in the real world and where they won’t, but suffice it to say, this isn’t the best laptop to pick if you want to make the most of a Creator Studio subscription.

All in all, the MacBook Neo seems well-positioned to satisfy those whom Apple is marketing it toward. Predominantly, that seems to be iPhone users who don’t have any kind of computer yet, or people who are unhappy with their budget Windows PC or Chromebook. Apple’s product page makes a big deal about the features that work across iOS and macOS and has a dedicated “new to Mac” section that pitches the platform to people who have never used it. The biggest downside for Apple is the risk that the Neo’s 8GB RAM limit and less-powerful chip will end up frustrating people who buy a Mac hoping to use Final Cut or Logic and bump into the limits of the hardware.

MacBook Neo hands-on: Apple build quality at a substantially lower price Read More »

M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon

Apple, Apple M5, apple m5 max, apple m5 pro, Apple silicon, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 3, 2026

Apple is using more chiplets and three types of CPU cores to make the M5 family.

As part of today’s MacBook Pro update, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the newest members of the M5 chip family.

Normally, the Pro and Max chips take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up—more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more memory bandwidth. But the M5 chips are a surprisingly large departure from past generations, both in terms of the CPU architectures they use and in how they’re packaged together.

We won’t know the impact these changes have had on performance until we have hardware in hand to test, but here are all the technical details we’ve been able to glean about the new updates and how the M5 chip family stacks up against the past few generations of Apple Silicon chips.

New Fusion Architecture and a third type of CPU core

Apple says that M5 Pro and M5 Max use an “all-new Fusion Architecture” that welds two silicon chiplets into a single processor. Apple has used this approach before, but historically only to combine two Max chips together into an Ultra.

Apple’s approach here is different—for example, the M5 Pro is not just a pair of M5 chips welded together. Rather, Apple has one chiplet handling the CPU and most of the I/O, and a second one that’s mainly for graphics, both built on the same 3nm TSMC manufacturing process.

The first silicon die is always the same, whether you get an M5 Pro or M5 Max. It includes the 18-core CPU, the 16-core Neural Engine, and controllers for the SSD, for the Thunderbolt ports, and for driving displays.

The second die is where the two chips differ; the M5 Pro gets up to 20 GPU cores, a single media encoding/decoding engine, and a memory controller with up to 307 GB/s of bandwidth. The M5 Max gets up to 40 GPU cores, a pair of media encoding/decoding engines, and a memory controller that provides up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth (note that everything in the GPU die seems to be doubled, implying that Apple is, in fact, sticking two M5 Pro GPUs together to make one M5 Max GPU).

Apple’s spec sheets now list three distinct types of CPU cores: “super” cores, performance cores, and efficiency cores. Credit: Apple

Apple is also introducing a third distinct type of CPU core beyond the typical “performance cores” and “efficiency cores” that were included in older M-series processors.

At the top, you have “super cores,” which is Apple’s new M5-era branding for what it used to call “performance cores.” This change is retroactive and also applies to the regular M5; Apple’s spec sheet for the M5 MacBook Pro used to refer to the big cores as “performance cores” but now calls them “super cores.”

At the bottom of the hierarchy, you still have “efficiency cores” that are tuned for low power usage. The M5 still uses six efficiency cores, and unlike the super cores, they haven’t been rebranded since yesterday. These cores do help with multi-core performance, but they prioritize lower power usage and lower temperatures first, since they need to fit in fanless devices like the iPad Pro and MacBook Air.

And now, in the middle, we have a new type of “performance core” used exclusively in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

These are, in fact, a new, third type of CPU core design, distinct from both the super cores and the M5’s efficiency cores. They apparently use designs similar to the super cores but prioritize multi-threaded performance rather than fast single-core performance. Apple’s approach with the new performance cores sounds similar to the one AMD uses in its laptop silicon: it has larger Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPU cores, optimized for peak clock speeds and higher power usage, and smaller Zen 4c and Zen 5c cores that support the same capabilities but run slower and are optimized to use less die space.

What we don’t know yet is how these new chips perform relative to the previous versions. Technically, the M4 Pro and M4 Max both had more “big” cores than the M5 Pro and M5 Max do—up to 10 for the M4 Pro and up to 12 for the M4 Max. But higher single-core performance from the six “super cores” and strong multi-core performance from the 12 performance cores should mean that the M5 generation still shakes out to be faster overall.

How all the chips compare

For Mac buyers choosing between these three processors, we’re updating the spec tables we’ve put together in the past, comparing the M5-generation chips to one another and to their counterparts in the M2, M3, and M4 generations.

Here’s how all of the M5 chips stack up, including the partly disabled versions of each chip that Apple sells in lower-end MacBook Air and Pro models:

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth	Video decode/encode engines
Apple M5 (low)	4S/6E	8	16GB	Up to three	153GB/s	One
Apple M5 (high)	4S/6E	10	16/24/32GB	Up to three	153GB/s	One
Apple M5 Pro (low)	5S/10P	16	24GB	Up to four	307GB/s	One
Apple M5 Pro (high)	6S/12P	20	24/48/64GB	Up to four	307GB/s	One
Apple M5 Max (low)	6S/12P	32	36GB	Up to five	460GB/s	Two
Apple M5 Max (high)	6S/12P	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	614GB/s	Two

Despite all the big under-the-hood changes, the basic hierarchy here remains the same as in past generations. The Pro tier offers the biggest bump to CPU performance compared to the basic M5, along with twice as many GPU cores. The Max chip is mainly meant for those who want better graphics, 128GB of RAM, or both.

Compared to M2, M3, and M4

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 (high)	4S/6E	8	16/24/32GB	Up to three	153GB/s
Apple M4 (high)	4P/6E	10	16/24/32GB	Up to three	120GB/s
Apple M3 (high)	4P/4E	10	8/16/24GB	Up to two	102.4GB/s
Apple M2 (high)	4P/4E	10	8/16/24GB	Up to two	102.4GB/s

Compared to past generations, the M5 looks like the basic incremental improvement that we’re used to—no huge jumps in CPU or GPU core counts, relying mostly on architectural improvements and memory bandwidth increases to deliver the expected generation-over-generation speed boost. The Pro and Max chips have similar graphics core counts across generations, but there has been more variability when it comes to the CPU cores.

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 Pro (high)	6S/12P	20	24/48/64GB	Up to four	307GB/s
Apple M4 Pro (high)	10P/4E	20	24/48/64GB	Up to three	273GB/s
Apple M3 Pro (high)	6P/6E	18	18/36GB	Up to three	153.6GB/s
Apple M2 Pro (high)	8P/4E	19	16/32GB	Up to three	204.8GB/s

The Pro chips have been sort of all over the place, and the M3 generation in particular is an outlier. When we tested it at the time, we found it to be more or less a wash compared to the M2 Pro, which was (and still is) rare for Apple Silicon generations. The M4 Pro was a better upgrade, and the M5 Pro should still feel like an improvement over the M4 Pro despite the big underlying changes.

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 Max (high)	6S/12P	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	614GB/s
Apple M4 Max (high)	12P/4E	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	546GB/s
Apple M3 Max (high)	12P/4E	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s
Apple M2 Max (high)	8P/4E	38	64/96GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s

The M5 Max will be the biggest test for Apple’s new performance cores. According to our testing of the M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5-generation super cores are about 12 to 15 percent faster than the M4 generation’s performance cores. The M4 Max had up to 12 of those cores, while the M5 Max only has six. That leaves a pretty substantial gap for M5 Max’s new non-super P-cores to close.

Aside from that, the biggest outstanding question is how the M5 shakeup changes Apple’s approach to Ultra chips, assuming the company continues to make them (Apple has already said that not every processor generation will see an Ultra update).

The M1 Ultra, M2 Ultra, and M3 Ultra were all made by fusing two Max chips together, perfectly doubling the CPU and GPU core counts. Will an M5 Ultra still weld two M5 Max chips together using the same basic ingredients to make an even larger processor? Or will Apple create distinct CPU and GPU chiplets just for the Ultra series? All we can say for sure is that we can no longer make assumptions based on Apple’s past behavior, which tends to be the most reliable predictor of its future behavior.

M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon Read More »

New MacBook Airs come with M5, double the storage, and higher starting prices

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, MacBook Air, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 3, 2026

Most of Apple’s laptop lineup is getting refreshed today—the high-end MacBook Pros are getting M5 Pro and M5 Max chip refreshes, and the MacBook Air is getting upgraded with an M5.

The more significant update might be the storage, though: Apple is bumping the Air’s base storage from 256GB up to 512GB, and Apple says the storage will be up to twice as fast as the M4 MacBook Air.

But that’s also increasing the Air’s starting price from $999 to $1,099 for the 13-inch model, and from $1,199 to $1,299 for the 15-inch model. Whether you describe this as a price increase or a price cut depends on your point of view; the 512GB version of the M4 MacBook Air would have cost you $1,199. But for people who just want the cheapest Air and don’t particularly care about the specs, the pricing is now $100 higher than it was before.

Apple is offering two versions of the M5 in the new Airs: one with 8 GPU cores enabled, and one with all 10 GPU cores enabled. Upgrading to the fully enabled chip will run you an extra $100, and you’ll also need to have the fully enabled chip to step up to the 24GB or 32GB RAM upgrades or the 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB storage upgrades. All versions of the M5 include a total of four high-performance cores—now dubbed “super cores”—and six efficiency cores.

An Apple N1 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip rounds out the internal upgrades.

Like the other products Apple has announced so far this week, the new MacBook Airs will be available for preorder on March 4, and you’ll be able to get them on March 11.

The new MacBook Airs are part of a string of announcements that Apple is making this week in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. So far, the company has also announced a new iPhone 17e, an updated iPad Air with an M4 chip and additional RAM, new MacBook Pros, and updated Studio Displays.

Increasing the starting price of the MacBook Air, incidentally, leaves even more room in Apple’s lineup for the new, cheaper MacBook that the company is said to be planning. If Apple is planning to launch this cheaper MacBook this week, the announcement will likely come tomorrow.

New MacBook Airs come with M5, double the storage, and higher starting prices Read More »

Apple intros M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and its first new monitors in years

Apple, MacBook Pro, studio display, Tech / Beth Washington / March 3, 2026

Apple updated its low-end MacBook Pro with the Apple M5 chip back in October, but the higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch Pros stuck with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. This morning, Apple circled back and updated the rest of the lineup, adding the M5 Pro and M5 Max to the higher-end machines and bumping the base storage—the M5 Pro now comes with 1TB of storage by default, while M5 Max chips come with 2TB of storage by default. The internal storage is said to be “up to 2x faster” than the previous-generation Pros. Apple is also bumping the base storage for the M5 MacBook Pro from 512GB to 1TB.

Unlike Apple’s other announcements this week, though, these upgrades also come with increases to their starting prices; the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip now starts at $2,199 instead of $1,999, and the 16-inch model with an M5 Pro chip starts at $2,699 instead of $2,499. The M5 MacBook Pro now starts at $1,699, up from $1,599. Granted, you’re getting double the storage of those old base models, but you no longer have the option to pay less if you don’t need 1TB of space.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max look like fairly major updates from the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Both use an 18-core CPU with six higher-performing cores and 12 lower-performing cores, but Apple is changing how it talks about each kind of core. The high-performance cores are now called “super cores,” a change that Apple says will retroactively apply to the high-performance cores in the basic Apple M5. The M5 has four of them, and M5 Pro and M5 Max have six.

Apple says the 12 other CPU cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max are an “all-new performance core that is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads.” These appear to be different from the efficiency cores used in M5 and older Apple chips. Apple didn’t make direct generation-over-generation performance comparisons, but it did say that M5 Pro and M5 Max “deliver up to 2.5x higher multithreaded performance than M1 Pro and M1 Max.”

Apple intros M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and its first new monitors in years Read More »

$599 M4 iPad Air is a lot like the old one, but with a substantial RAM boost

Apple, ipad, iPad Air, iPadOS, ipados 26, Tech / Mike M. / March 2, 2026

This version of the Apple M4 is slightly cut down compared to the version that ships in Macs or that came with the M4 iPad Pro. It has only 8 CPU cores—3 high-performance cores and 5 efficiency cores, down from a maximum of and 4 and 6. It also uses 9 GPU cores instead of 10, and there isn’t an Air variant with 16GB of RAM. A 16GB RAM configuration was available for M4 iPad Pros with 1TB or 2TB of storage. The cellular versions also pick up Apple’s in-house Apple C1X modem, plus the Apple N1 chip for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

Otherwise, very little has changed about the new iPad Air. It still comes in four relatively muted color options (space gray, blue, purple, and a pale gold “starlight”), still uses a regular 60 Hz LCD display rather than an OLED or ProMotion screen, still uses a power button-mounted TouchID sensor rather than FaceID, and still includes a single-lens 12MP rear camera with no flash. Apple continues to not offer its nano-texture display coating for the Air, either—that’s reserved exclusively for higher-end iPad Pro configurations.

The new iPad Air is part of a string of announcements that Apple is planning in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. The company also announced a new iPhone 17e today and is widely expected to debut a new low-end iPad and a new MacBook that’s substantially cheaper than the MacBook Air.

This piece was updated at 11: 15am on March 2 to add details about the M4 chip’s CPU core configuration, and to mention the Apple N1 and C1X wireless chips.

$599 M4 iPad Air is a lot like the old one, but with a substantial RAM boost Read More »

Apple’s new iPhone 17e has an A19 chip, MagSafe, and 256GB of storage for $599

Apple, iOS, ios 26, IPhone, iPhone 16e, iphone 17e, iphone SE, Tech / 9u50fv / March 2, 2026

The iPhone 17e will support MagSafe, which was notably absent from the 16e. Credit: Apple

The 17e comes in three color options: black, white, and a pastel pink. It still includes a USB-C port, a notched display rather than a Dynamic Island, an Action Button, a 6.1-inch 60 Hz OLED display without ProMotion or always-on support, and a single 48 megapixel rear camera (which is still capable of taking 2x telephoto images by cropping a 24 MP chunk out of the middle of the image sensor).

The biggest problem with the iPhone 17e is still that it’s just $200 cheaper than the iPhone 17, which is an exceptionally strong version of Apple’s default phone. That $200 gets you a better main camera, a wide-angle lens, a slightly larger 6.3-inch display with ProMotion support and a Dynamic Island, and marginally faster graphics performance. But the 17e’s 256GB storage upgrade and the new chip do make it more appealing than the $699 iPhone 16, which also lacks a ProMotion display and only has 128GB of storage.

The new phone is part of a string of announcements that Apple is planning in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. The company also announced a new iPad Air with an M4 chip today and is also widely expected to debut a new low-end iPad and a new MacBook that’s substantially cheaper than the MacBook Air.

Apple’s new iPhone 17e has an A19 chip, MagSafe, and 256GB of storage for $599 Read More »

Apple says it has “a big week ahead.” Here’s what we expect to see.

Apple, Apple silicon, ipad, IPhone, MacBook, Tech / 9u50fv / February 28, 2026

it’s what’s on the inside that counts

Apple is taking an “ain’t broke/don’t fix” approach to most of its gadgets.

Apple’s 2018-era design for the then-Intel-powered MacBook Air. The M1 Air used largely the same design, and we expect Apple’s lower-cost MacBook to look pretty similar. Credit: Valentina Palladino

Excepting the AirTag 2, so far it’s been a quiet year for Apple hardware. But that’s poised to change next week, as the company is hosting a “special experience” on March 4.

The use of the word experience, rather than event or presentation, implies that Apple’s typical presentation format won’t apply here. And CEO Tim Cook more or less confirmed this when he posted that the company had “a big week ahead,” starting on Monday. Apple is most likely planning multiple days of product launches announced via press release on its Newsroom site, with the “experience” on Wednesday serving as a capper and a hands-on session for the media.

Apple has used a similar strategy before, spacing out relatively low-key refreshes over several days to generate sustained interest rather than dropping everything in a single 30- to 60-minute string of pre-recorded videos.

Reporting on what, exactly, Apple plans to announce has consistently centered on a small handful of specific devices, but with the exception of the iPhone 17 series, the M5 Vision Pro, and the Apple Watch, most of Apple’s major products have gone long enough without an update that anything is possible. Here’s what we consider to be the most likely, and a few other notes besides.

The long-awaited “budget” MacBook

Most rumors and leaks agree that Apple is preparing to launch a new MacBook priced well below the MacBook Air, in a style similar to the $349 iPad or the iPhone 16e. Commonly cited specs include a 13-inch-ish screen and an Apple A18 Pro chip, which debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro in 2024 and is typically packaged with 8GB of RAM. The laptop is also said to be coming in multiple colors, taking a page from the iMac and the basic iPad.

Rumors have circulated about a “cheap” MacBook purpose-built for cost-conscious buyers since the late 2000s, if not before. But none of these, if they’ve existed in Apple’s labs, have ever made it to stores, and Apple’s laptops have reliably started at around $1,000 for over 20 years.

But in the two years since removing it from its online store, Apple has used the old M1 MacBook Air design as a sort of trial balloon. Since early 2024, the laptop has only been available through Walmart in the US, with a basic 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. But it has been priced in the same $600 to $700 range as midrange Windows laptops and higher-end Chromebooks and has apparently done well enough to merit a true successor.

I expect Apple to follow a pattern similar to what it did when it first launched the $329 iPad in 2017, or the iPhone SE in 2016: to essentially re-use the 2020-era MacBook Air’s design and other components to the greatest degree possible.

These are already parts that Apple and its suppliers have a lot of experience manufacturing, and they’ve been around long enough that they’re probably about as inexpensive as they’re going to get. They’re also proven components that meet Apple’s usual standards for materials and build quality. If that leaves the new MacBook slightly out of step with the rest of Apple’s laptop designs, that’s a compromise the company has been willing to make in the past.

Some of the details of this system will probably be a surprise, but we can expect Apple to create some intentional distance between this MacBook and the MacBook Air, the same as it does for the low-end iPad and iPhone. The processor will be one limitation; the potential 8GB RAM ceiling, limited upgrade options, fewer and less-capable ports, and limited external display support may be others.

This thing is likely destined to be an email, browsing, and casual phone-camera-photo-editing machine for people who prefer a traditional clamshell laptop to an iPad. The $999-and-up MacBook Air will continue to be Apple’s default do-anything laptop, and the MacBook Pro will continue to occupy the “do-anything, but faster” position.

The $349 iPad

Apple’s basic $349 iPad could get an Apple Intelligence update, thanks to a processor and RAM bump. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Speaking of the Apple A18 series, Apple is apparently planning a refresh of its $349 base-model iPad that uses an A18 or possibly an A19. Assuming it still comes with 8GB of RAM—up from 6GB for the current Apple A16-powered iPad—either chip would help it clear the bar for Apple Intelligence support.

Apple doesn’t always update its basic iPad every year; in 2024, for instance, it got a price drop rather than a hardware refresh. But the A16 iPad is currently the only thing in the entire iPhone/iPad/Mac lineup without support for Apple Intelligence, a bundle of features that Apple markets pretty heavily despite their functional unevenness. That marketing campaign is likely to intensify when Apple finally releases its new Google Gemini-powered Siri update at some point this year.

Even if you don’t care about Apple Intelligence, a basic iPad with 8GB of RAM will be a win for most users, since you can use that extra RAM for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with AI. It’s the same amount of memory Apple has shipped with the iPad Air since the M1 model, and with several generations of iPad Pro. Even attached to a slower processor, this should still improve the multitasking and productivity experience on the tablet.

The iPhone 17e

Apple would let the old iPhone SE languish for at least a couple years between updates, but it’s apparently taking a different tack with the “e” iPhones.

The main star of this refresh is a new chip, which will supposedly be upgraded from an Apple A18 to an A19. It’s also said to be picking up MagSafe charging support, making it compatible with Apple-made and third-party accessories that magnetically clamp to the back of other iPhones.

Other than that, the rumor mill suggests that the 17e will stick with its notched screen rather than a Dynamic Island, and we’d be surprised to see it move beyond its basic one-lens camera. Assuming Apple sticks with the same $599 starting price, though, there will still be some awkward overlap between the iPhone 16 and the regular iPhone 17.

The iPad Air

Do you like the current iPad Air with the Apple M3? Or the last one with the Apple M2?

That’s lucky for you, because a next-generation iPad Air is likely to continue in the same vein, picking up a new chip but not changing much else. If you’re holding out for something more exciting, like improved screen technology, you’ll likely be disappointed.

There’s no word on whether the M4 might come with any other internal upgrades, like more RAM or increased storage in the base model. Either or both of those could spice up an otherwise straightforward update.

Other possibilities

Apple could update the remaining M4 family MacBook Pros (pictured) with M5 family replacements. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple could choose to refresh almost any of its Macs next week—only the low-end MacBook Pro has an M5 chip, and it has been at least a year since the rest of the lineup was last updated. There’s no refresh that would come as a true surprise, excepting maybe the Mac Pro that Apple has allegedly put “on the back burner” (again).

Higher-end MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max processors would be the most interesting updates, since they would be the first Macs to debut higher-end M5 family processors. But if you’re not desperate for an upgrade, it might be better to keep waiting a while longer. These M5 models are said to continue using the same design Apple has been using for the MacBook Pro for the last five years, and a more significant design update with OLED touchscreens and the Mac’s first Dynamic Island could be on the horizon.

M5 updates for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air, the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Mac Studio could happen, too; none of these computers are said to be getting any kind of significant design overhaul this generation. I would, however, be surprised if Apple chose to refresh these Macs all at once. To update some models now and hold others back until later in the spring or maybe even until the Worldwide Developers Conference in June would be more in keeping with Apple’s past practice.

As for other devices, reports have circulated for months about an imminent update for the Apple TV box, last refreshed in 2022. It has yet to materialize and is not mentioned on any shortlist for next week’s announcements, but an update is well overdue, and a new chip like the A18 or A19 would be necessary if Apple wanted to start bringing Apple Intelligence features to tvOS.

The common theme to all of these refreshes is that we can expect their updates to happen primarily on the inside, rather than the outside. The inside of a device is often more important than the outside of it, and these kinds of chip-only updates are usually successful in keeping Apple’s hardware feeling fresh. Just don’t expect to have many interesting new things to look at.

Apple says it has “a big week ahead.” Here’s what we expect to see. Read More »

How to downgrade from macOS 26 Tahoe on a new Mac

Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, macOS 15, macos 15 sequoia, macos 26, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / 9u50fv / February 27, 2026

Most new Macs can still be downgraded with few downsides. Here’s what to know.

An Ars Technica colleague recently bought a new M4 MacBook Air. I have essentially nothing bad to say about this hardware, except to point out that even in our current memory shortage apocalypse, Apple is still charging higher-than-market-rates for RAM and SSD upgrades. Still, most people buying this laptop will have a perfectly nice time with it.

But for this colleague, it was also their first interaction with macOS 26 Tahoe and the Liquid Glass redesign, the Mac’s first major software design update since the Apple Silicon era began with macOS 11 Big Sur in 2020.

Negative consumer reaction to Liquid Glass has been overstated by some members of the Apple enthusiast media ecosystem, and Apple’s data shows that iOS 26 adoption rates are roughly in line with those of the last few years. But the Mac’s foray into Liquid Glass has drawn particular ire from longtime users (developers Jeff Johnson and Norbert Heger have been tracking persistently weird Finder and window resizing behavior, to pick two concrete examples, and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has encouraged users not to upgrade).

My general approach to software redesigns is to just roll with them and let their imperfections and quirks become background noise over time—it’s part of my job to point out problems where I see them, but I also need to keep up with new releases whether I’m in love with them or not.

But this person has no such job requirement, and they had two questions: Can I downgrade this? And if so, how?

The answer to the first question is “yes, usually,” and Apple provides some advice scattered across multiple documentation pages. This is an attempt to bring all of those steps together into one page, aimed directly at new Mac buyers who are desperate to switch from Tahoe to the more-familiar macOS 15 Sequoia.

Table of Contents

A preemptive warning about security updates and older versions of macOS

Before we begin: Apple handles macOS updates differently from iOS updates. Eventually, Apple requires devices that support the latest iOS and iPadOS versions to install those updates if they want to continue getting security patches. That means if your iPhone or iPad can run iOS or iPadOS 26, it needs to be running iOS or iPadOS 26 to stay patched.

Older macOS versions, on the other hand, are updated for around three years after they’re initially released. The first year, they get both security patches and new features. The next two years, they get security patches and new versions of the Safari browser. Macs running older-but-supported macOS versions also generally continue to get the same firmware updates as those running the latest macOS version.

Generally, we’d recommend against using macOS versions after security updates have dried up. For macOS 15 Sequoia, that will happen around September or October of 2027. Apple also sometimes leaves individual vulnerabilities unpatched on older operating systems; only the latest releases are guaranteed to get every patch. If you can look past the elements of Tahoe’s design that bother you most, staying on it is the safest option.

You can follow steps similar to the ones in this guide to downgrade some Macs to even older versions of macOS, but I wouldn’t recommend it; macOS 14 Sonoma will get security and Safari updates for only another six months or so, which isn’t long enough to justify spending the time to install it.

What we won’t cover is how to transfer data you want to keep from your Tahoe install to an older version of macOS. We’re assuming you have a new and relatively pristine Mac to downgrade, one that you haven’t loaded up with data other than what you already have synced to iCloud.

Can my Mac downgrade?

Mostly, yes. Any Mac with an M4 family chip or older, including the M4 MacBook Air and everything else in Apple’s current lineup, should support the current version of Sequoia (as of this writing, 15.7.4, with Safari 26.3).

As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.

The only Mac to launch since Tahoe was released is the M5 MacBook Pro, so owners of that system will need Tahoe or newer. If Apple puts out new Macs in early March as expected, those Macs will also only work with Tahoe or newer, and downgrades won’t be possible.

Although we’re mainly talking about new Macs here, these steps should all be identical for any Apple Silicon Mac, from the original M1 computers on up. If you buy a recently used Mac that ships with Tahoe installed, a downgrade still works the same way. We won’t cover the steps for installing anything on an Intel Mac—vanishingly few of them support Tahoe in the first place, and most people certainly shouldn’t be buying them at this late date.

Option one: A bootable USB installer

Apple hasn’t shipped physical install media for macOS in 15 years, but each downloadable installer still includes the bits you need to make a bootable USB install drive. And while late-Intel-era Macs with Apple T2 chips briefly made booting from external media kind of a pain, Apple Silicon Macs will boot from a USB drive just as easily and happily as early Intel-era Macs did.

This method will be the easiest for most people because it only requires you to own a single Mac—the one you’re downgrading.

Create the USB installer

Downloading the Sequoia installer through Software Update. Downloading this way serves as an additional compatibility check; your Mac won’t download any version of macOS too old for it to run. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

To make a USB installer, you’ll need a 32GB or larger USB flash drive and the downloadable macOS Sequoia installer. A 16GB drive was large enough for macOS for many years, but Sequoia and Tahoe are too large by a couple of gigabytes.

Apple’s support page here links to every downloadable macOS installer going back to 2011’s 10.7 Lion. In Tahoe, the macOS Sequoia link takes you to the App Store, which then bounces you to Software Update in the Settings app. This process has enough points of failure that it may not work the first time; try clicking the “Get” button in the App Store again and it usually goes.

If you’re downloading the installer from within macOS Tahoe, you’ll see a pop-up when the download completes, telling you that the installer can’t be run from within that version of macOS. Since we’ll be running it off of its own USB stick, you can safely ignore this message.

While the installer is downloading, install and prepare your USB drive. Open Disk Utility, click the View button, and select “show all devices.” Click the root of your USB drive under the “external” header in the left sidebar, and click the Erase button in the upper-right control area.

Change the disk’s name to whatever you want—I use “MyVolume” so I don’t have to change Apple’s sample terminal commands when copying the installer files—and make sure the Format is set to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the Scheme is set to GUID Partition Map. (That’s not an error; the macOS installer still wants an HFS+ filesystem rather than APFS.)

The handy thing is that if you have a larger USB drive, you can create installers for multiple macOS versions by partitioning the disk with the Partition button. A 64GB drive split into three ~21GB partitions could boot Tahoe, Sequoia, and another past or future macOS version; I just have it split into two volumes so I can boot Sequoia and Tahoe installers from the same drive.

Running the Terminal command to create our macOS 15 Sequoia boot drive. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Once the Sequoia installer is in your Applications folder, run a Terminal command to copy the installer files. Apple has commands for each version of macOS on this page. Use this one for Sequoia:

sudo /Applications/Install macOS Sequoia.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

If you named the USB drive something other than MyVolume when you formatted it, change the name in the command as well. Note that names with spaces require a backslash before each space.

The Terminal will prompt you for your password and ask you to type Y to confirm. It will then reformat the drive and copy the files over. The time this takes will vary depending on the speed of the USB drive you’re using, but for most USB 3 drives, it should only take a few minutes to create the installer. When the Terminal command is done running, leave the disk inserted and shut down your Mac.

Using the USB installer

With your Mac powered down and the USB installer drive inserted, press and hold the power button on your Mac (the Touch ID button on any laptop or the dedicated power button on a desktop) until the text under the Apple logo changes to “loading startup options.” You should see the macOS Sequoia installer listed alongside Macintosh HD as a boot option; highlight it and click Continue. If you don’t see the Sequoia installer, you may need an extra step—highlight Options, then click Continue, and we’ll talk more about this momentarily.

Once booted, the Sequoia installer will automatically launch the macOS installer to do an in-place upgrade, which isn’t what we want. Hit Command+Q to quit the installer and click through the confirmation, and you’ll get the typical menu of recovery environment options; from here, launch Disk Utility, click the top level of the internal Macintosh HD disk, and click Erase. Click through the prompts to erase the Mac and restart.

My own macOS USB installer from my beloved Micro Center. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

After the Mac restarts, you’ll need an Internet connection to activate it before you can do anything else with it; connect using the Wi-Fi menu in the top-right, typing in your network SSID and password manually if the menu doesn’t auto-populate. This will activate your Mac and get you back to the recovery environment menu.

Here, select the Sequoia installer and click through the prompts—you should be able to install Sequoia on the now-empty Macintosh HD volume with no difficulty. From here, there’s nothing else to do. Wait until the installation completes, and when it’s ready, it will boot into a fresh Sequoia install, ready to be set up.

If you didn’t see your Sequoia installer in the boot menu before and you clicked the Options gear instead, it usually means that FileVault encryption or Find My was enabled on the Mac—maybe you signed into your Apple account when you were initially setting up Tahoe before you decided you wanted nothing to do with it.

When you boot into the recovery environment, you’ll be asked to select a user you know the password for, which will unlock the encrypted disk. If all you want to do is erase the Mac and make it bootable from your USB stick, don’t worry about this; just select Recovery Assistant from the menu, select Erase Mac, and click through the prompts. Then, use the steps above to boot from your USB stick, and you should be able to install a fresh copy of whatever macOS version you want to the now-erased internal drive.

The nuclear option: A DFU restore

Normally, a bootable USB installer does everything you need it to do. It wipes the data from your Mac’s internal storage and replaces it with new data. But occasionally you need to drill a little deeper, either because your Mac becomes unresponsive or you’ve been running beta software and want to switch back to a stable release. Or just because other steps haven’t worked for you.

The nuclear option for resetting a Mac is a DFU (or Device Firmware Upgrade) restore. Based on the restore process for iPhones and iPads, a DFU restore uses a compressed IPSW archive that contains not only the macOS system files but also firmware files for all Apple Silicon Macs. The USB installer just replaces macOS; the DFU restore replaces everything from the firmware on up. (These are also the same files used to create macOS virtual machines using Apple’s Virtualization Framework.)

Because a DFU restore can only be performed on a Mac that’s booted into a special DFU mode, you’ll need a second Mac with a USB-C or Thunderbolt port, plus a USB-C cable. Apple says the USB-C charging cable included with Macs will work for this but not to use a Thunderbolt cable; I’ve used a generic USB-C cable, and it has worked fine.

The first step is to download the relevant IPSW file from Apple. This page on the Mr. Macintosh site is the one I have bookmarked because it’s a good repository of virtually every macOS IPSW file Apple has ever released, including beta versions for when those are useful.

First, download the macOS 15.6.1 IPSW file linked on that page (and here) to your host Mac (Apple stops releasing IPSW files for older OSes once newer ones have been released, so this is the newest file you’ll be able to get for macOS 15). Both iPhones and iPads have model-specific IPSW files, but for macOS, there’s just one image that works with all Macs.

On the Mac you’re trying to restore—we’ll call it the “target Mac” for simplicity’s sake—figure out which of its USB-C ports is the designated DFU port. There’s only one that will work, and it’s usually the leftmost or rightmost port. Plug one end of the USB-C cable into that DFU port and the other into any USB-C port on your host Mac and follow Apple’s instructions for how to boot the system into DFU mode.

A Mac in DFU mode will need permission before your Mac can work with it. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

When it’s successfully booted into DFU mode, your host Mac will see the target Mac, and you’ll see the same notification you get any time you plug in USB accessories for the first time. Allow it to connect, open a Finder window, and scroll down the left-hand sidebar until you get to “Mac” under the Locations heading.

The Finder’s DFU interface is pretty simple—a picture, a line of text, and two buttons. We want to restore, not revive, the Mac. Clicking the Revive Mac button will normally download and install the latest macOS version from Apple. But you can force it to use a different IPSW file—like the Sequoia one we just downloaded—by holding down the Option key as you click it. Navigate to the IPSW file, open it, and allow the restore process to begin.

This will take some time; you can track progress in the first phase in the Finder window. After a few minutes, the Mac you’re restoring will light back up, and you can watch its progress there. Once the target Mac reboots with its signature chime, the process is complete.

Because the IPSW file is for an outdated version of Sequoia, the first thing you’ll want to do is hit Software Update for the latest Sequoia and Safari versions; you’ll be offered a Tahoe upgrade, but you obviously won’t want to do that after the trouble you just went through. Scroll down to “other updates,” and you’ll be offered all the non-Tahoe updates available.

Downgrader’s remorse?

You will run into a handful of downsides when running an older version of macOS, especially if you’re trying to use it with iPhones and/or iPads that have been updated to version 26.

Most of the awkwardness will involve new features introduced in Messages, Notes, Reminders, and other Apple apps that sync between devices. The Messages app in Sequoia doesn’t support background images or polls, and it handles spam filtering slightly differently. They’re minor absences and annoyances, mostly, but they’re still absences and annoyances.

At least for the time being, though, you’ll find Sequoia pretty well-supported by most of Apple’s ecosystem. Core services like iCloud and iMessage aren’t going anywhere; Xcode still supports Sequoia, as does every Apple Creator Studio app update aside from the new Pixelmator Pro. App support may eventually drop off, but there’s not a lot that requires the latest and greatest version of macOS.

If and when you decide it’s time to step up to a newer version of macOS, Tahoe (or whatever macOS 27 is called) will be there in Software Update waiting for you. You’ll need to install a new version eventually if you want to keep getting app updates and security patches. But you don’t have to yet.

How to downgrade from macOS 26 Tahoe on a new Mac Read More »