Apple M5

M5 MacBook Air review: Still the best MacBook for almost everybody

15-inch MacBook Air, Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, Features, m5 macbook air, MacBook Air, Tech / Beth Washington / March 15, 2026

The M5 MacBook Air is a minor upgrade, but minor upgrades add up over time.

Apple’s 15-inch M5 MacBook Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The M5 Pro and M5 Max in the new MacBook Pros are interesting not because they deliver a solid speed increase for Apple’s fastest laptop processors but because they also include substantial under-the-hood changes. And the MacBook Neo is interesting because, while the hardware has limits, it’s quite a capable and high-quality computer for its $599 starting price.

And then there’s the M5 MacBook Air, which was also released this week.

Apple sent us a 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro, the MacBook Neo, and a 15-inch MacBook Air to test, and the MacBook Air was the only one without a standard review embargo. As if to say, “we know the other stuff is more interesting—if you want to cover the Air, get to it when you can.”

So here we are.

Still the MacBook for most people

Last year’s M4 MacBook Air was pretty near the platonic ideal of the $999 laptop that Apple has been refining since the introduction of the first $999 iBooks in the early 2000s. The Apple Silicon iteration of the Air has always been a solid, mass-market machine, but the M4 version was the rare iteration that didn’t feel like it needed one or two $200 upgrades to be useful and future-proofed.

The M5 Air brings good news and bad news on that front, depending on your perspective. The 13-inch M5 Air starts at $1,099, $100 more than before, and there’s no Air at $999 anymore. Both the M1 and M2 Airs stuck around for a while in that spot after being replaced—not so for the M4 Air. The 15-inch Air starts $200 higher at $1,299, though it at least guarantees you the 10-core version of the M5 GPU rather than the 8-core version in the $1,099 13-inch Air.

But the M5 Air also comes with 512GB of storage rather than 256GB, previously a $200 upgrade. In an ideal world, I’d prefer to keep the $999 version and see Apple lower the price of its storage upgrades. But I suppose it’s basically a wash, especially now that the Air sits upmarket of another product rather than being the entry-level option.

That’s frankly the most striking thing about the MacBook Air right now—that it has slowly amassed so many power user features over the last five years that there’s now room underneath it for a less-capable-but-sufficiently-Mac-like thing.

It can get lost in a typical review that compares the current-generation product to the immediately preceding generation of the same product, but here’s a stab at a list of every change that Apple has made to the MacBook Air between the original late-2020 M1 version and now that has given buyers one less reason to look at a MacBook Pro:

Four generational processor upgrades that have added two more high-efficiency CPU cores, two more GPU cores, and other improvements that have collectively roughly doubled the M1’s performance (slightly less-than-double for single-core CPU performance, slightly more-than-double for graphics performance).
One full redesign (M2), which slightly increased the 13-inch Air’s screen size, resolution, and maximum brightness. It also reintroduced MagSafe, enabling charging without taking up one of the Thunderbolt ports.
The introduction of a 15-inch model (M2 mid-generation refresh), offering a larger screen to people who didn’t want to pay for the extra performance or frills of a MacBook Pro.
An increase in base RAM from 8GB to 16GB (M2/M3 mid-generation refresh).
Two increases in maximum RAM, first to 24GB (M2) and then to 32GB (M4 and later).
Base storage increased from 256GB to 512GB (M5).
Maximum storage increased from 2TB to 4TB (M5).
Improvements in external display support. The Air went from supporting one external 6K 60 Hz display to two external displays (one 6K 60 Hz, one 5K 60 Hz) when the lid was closed (M3) and to two external displays (both 6K 60 Hz) with the lid open and the built-in screen turned on (M4 and later).
One ProRes video encoding and decoding engine (M2).

The MacBook Pro retains some key functional advantages over the Air. All Pro models have more ports, including native HDMI and SD card readers. They get somewhat larger, considerably nicer displays, with high-refresh-rate ProMotion and HDR support, a much higher maximum brightness, and a matte nano-texture display option. Even setting the M5 Pro and M5 Max aside, the basic M5 version can be quite a bit faster than the M5 Air for some workloads because it has a fan to keep it cool. Storage can go as high as 8TB, and RAM can go up to 128GB.

But what these things have in common is that they’re well above and beyond what most people, even many creative and technical professionals, are asking from their laptops. These days, the main reason to go with a MacBook Pro is that you affirmatively want one or more of those extra things. There are fewer reasons to be unwillingly upsold to a Pro because of one or two make-or-break features missing from the Air.

It’s also mostly pretty easy to describe the kind of user each MacBook is for, which is a huge improvement from the Mac’s mid-2010s nadir, when the aging non-Retina Air, the nice-but-underpowered 12-inch MacBook, and the too-expensive 13-inch MacBook Pro were all fighting over the same $1,000-to-$1,500-ish price band and all came with frustrating trade-offs and compromises.

Performance: Twice as fast as M1, mostly

The Apple Silicon era gave Apple’s baseline Macs a huge performance boost compared to the low-voltage Intel processors of MacBooks past. That performance also came with dramatically extended battery life. As long as you were running Apple Silicon or universal binaries rather than relying on Rosetta’s app translation, upgrading from an Intel Mac has always been pretty much all upside.

The upgrades since then have been strictly incremental, considered year-over-year. Each new generation of chip has brought some kind of low double-digit performance improvement over the prior generation, never enough to merit an upgrade all by itself. But they’ve stacked on top of each other year after year, and we’ve arrived at a point where the M5 Air is finally just about twice as fast as the M1 version.

This is most consistently true in multi-core CPU tests and GPU tests, where architectural improvements have also been accompanied by a couple of extra cores. In many of our GPU-based tests, the M5 is also more than twice as fast as the M1. The improvement you see will vary from game to game or app to app, but it’s a substantial upgrade regardless.

In single-core CPU tests, the M5 is usually between 65 and 80 percent faster than the M1. A fair amount of that is coming from a 44 percent increase in peak CPU clock speed, from 3.2 GHz in the M1 to roughly 4.6 GHz for one of the M5’s super (née performance) cores.

Compared to the M4 version of the Air, the M5 iteration is a fairly typical generational upgrade. Single-core CPU performance increases by 10 or 15 percent, depending on the benchmark, while multi-core performance is closer to the 15 or 20 percent range. Graphics benchmark numbers go up by around 30 percent, though larger 55- to 58-percent increases in the GPU-based Blender benchmark suggest that test is benefiting in some way from the neural accelerators that Apple has included in each M5 GPU core.

Because of its silent, fanless design and passive heatsink, the M5 Air isn’t as fast as the M5 MacBook Pro, which does have a cooling fan. For single-core tasks, the M5 Air can run at its peak clock speeds pretty much indefinitely, so there’s not much difference between the computers there. You see bigger differences between them in multi-core CPU workloads like our Handbrake video encoding test or in 3D benchmarks—anything that stresses multiple parts of the chip for extended periods.

Using the macOS powermetrics tool, we can track clock speed and power usage over time to visualize exactly how that performance throttling happens. The Air’s clock speeds ramp down relatively quickly under stress, but power consumption is much lower, which makes the Air’s M5 the slightly more power-efficient chip overall. The Air has been pretty consistent over time in its throttling behavior—the M1 MacBook Air and M5 MacBook Air don’t behave exactly the same under load, but the curves have a pretty similar shape.

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.

The performance story for the MacBook Neo is “it’s basically OK for most things, but it’s complicated.” Its 8GB RAM cap will keep some kinds of programs, particularly games or high-end creative and productivity apps, from running well or at all. But in terms of raw benchmark performance, the M5 Air is between 25 and 50 percent faster than the Neo in single-core CPU tests and between two and three times faster at multi-core CPU workloads and GPU workloads that are especially hampered by the Neo’s A18 Pro chip’s aggressive throttling behavior.

The Neo is $500 cheaper than the Air (or $400, since the $699 version of the Neo with 512GB of storage and Touch ID is closer to an apples-to-apples comparison). For that money, you get a laptop that looks and feels a bit better but performs a lot better.

The laptop you don’t have to think about

The MacBook Neo might be tempting for people who were only buying the MacBook Air because it was the least expensive laptop in Apple’s lineup. But I still think the vast majority of MacBook buyers should get the Air instead if their budget allows it.

The M5 MacBook Air has enough memory and storage for most people. It performs well enough that most people will not need to worry about whether their computer can handle any given app or game. It’s light enough that most people will not have trouble carrying it around.

You get the picture. The MacBook Air might not be the perfect laptop for everyone, but configured with the right specs, the Air can work for just about anyone. And it’s a nice counterweight to the chaos and uncertainty of the PC market, where even flagship portables from big companies can occasionally ship with bizarre regressions like “battery life worse” or “keyboard doesn’t work.”

The other nice thing about the M5 Air is that it has knocked a little off the price of the M4 version of the Air in Apple’s refurbished store, and you’ll likely see similar discounts on the M4 Airs that are still in stock at other non-Apple retailers. The M5 version of the Air is a modest performance upgrade, but if you can get a better deal on an M4 version with the RAM and storage specs you want, you won’t be sorry you bought it instead. (It will also run macOS Sequoia, if avoiding macOS 26 Tahoe is a priority for you.)

The good

A remarkably consistent premium laptop for people who don’t want to think that much about their laptop.
M5 performs well, and 16GB of RAM is still a comfortable amount for most people.
Very good keyboard and large, accurate trackpad.
Bright and colorful high-resolution screen, even if a 60 Hz IPS display isn’t especially exciting.
Easy to use for a full day, or even two, without having to charge.
Multiple generations of Air upgrades have made it workable for many who would have had to pay for a MacBook Pro in prior years.
Comes close to double the performance of the M1 Air, making this a good place to upgrade if you were an early adopter of Apple Silicon who’s ready for a new machine.
Global RAM and storage shortages make Apple’s normally high upgrade pricing look slightly less unreasonable than it normally does.

The bad

Small base price increase from $999 to $1,099, though it comes with 512GB of storage instead of 256GB.
Goofy display notch is still goofy, even if you mostly stop noticing it after a while.
Sustained multi-core CPU workloads, and GPU workloads like gaming, are still somewhat slower on the M5 Air than on the M5 Pro, since it doesn’t have a cooling fan.

The ugly

Apple still reserves its nicest display features—like ProMotion and the nano-texture option—for the MacBook Pros.

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.

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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.

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

Signs point to a sooner-rather-than-later M5 MacBook Pro refresh

Apple, Apple M5, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Tech / Beth Washington / January 19, 2026

Mac power users waiting on new high-end MacBook Pro models may have been disappointed last fall, when Apple released an M5 upgrade for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro without touching the M4 Pro or Max versions of the laptop. But the wait for M5 Pro and M5 Max models may be nearing its end.

The tea-leaf readers at MacRumors noticed that shipping times for a handful of high-end MacBook Pro configurations have slipped into mid-to-late February, rather than being available immediately as most Mac models are. This is often, though not always, a sign that Apple has slowed down or stopped production of an existing product in anticipation of an update.

Currently, the shipping delays affect the M4 Max versions of both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. If you order them today, these models will arrive sometime between February 3 and February 24, depending on the configuration you choose; many M4 Pro versions are still available for same-day shipping, though adding a nano-texture display or upgrading RAM can still add a week or so to the shipping time.

Apple could choose to launch new Pro hardware on January 28, to go with the new Creator Studio subscription it announced last week. Aimed primarily at independent content creators that make their own video, audio, and images, the Creator Studio subscription bundles Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, and enhancements for the Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps (along with some other odds and ends) for $13 a month or $130 a year. None of these apps require a MacBook Pro, but many would benefit in some way from the additional CPU and GPU power, RAM, and storage available in Apple’s high-end laptops.

Of course, an imminent replacement isn’t the only reason why the shipping estimates for any given Mac might slip. Ongoing, AI-fueled RAM shortages could be causing problems, and Apple probably prioritizes production of the widely-used base-model M4 and M5 chips to the larger, more expensive, more complex Max models.

But the only other device in Apple’s lineup that offers the M4 Max and similar RAM configuration options is the high-end Mac Studio, which currently isn’t subject to the same shipping delays. That does imply that the delays are specific to the MacBook Pro—and one explanation for this is that the laptop is about to be replaced.

Signs point to a sooner-rather-than-later M5 MacBook Pro refresh Read More »

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices

AI, Apple, Apple M5, apple vision pro, ar, augmented reality, Features, metaverse, Mixed Reality, spatial computing, Tech, virtual reality, vision pro, visionOS, visionos 26, vr, XR / Mike M. / November 26, 2025

A state of the union from someone who actually sort of uses the thing.

The M5 Vision Pro with the Dual Knit Band. Credit: Samuel Axon

With the recent releases of visionOS 26 and newly refreshed Vision Pro hardware, it’s an ideal time to check in on Apple’s Vision Pro headset—a device I was simultaneously amazed and disappointed by when it launched in early 2024.

I still like the Vision Pro, but I can tell it’s hanging on by a thread. Content is light, developer support is tepid, and while Apple has taken action to improve both, it’s not enough, and I’m concerned it might be too late.

When I got a Vision Pro, I used it a lot: I watched movies on planes and in hotel rooms, I walked around my house placing application windows and testing out weird new ways of working. I tried all the neat games and educational apps, and I watched all the immersive videos I could get ahold of. I even tried my hand at developing my own applications for it.

As the months went on, though, I used it less and less. The novelty wore off, and as cool as it remained, practicality beat coolness. By the time Apple sent me the newer model a couple of weeks ago, I had only put the original one on a few times in the prior couple of months. I had mostly stopped using it at home, but I still took it on trips as an entertainment device for hotel rooms now and then.

That’s not an uncommon story. You even see it in the subreddit for Vision Pro owners, which ought to be the home of the device’s most dedicated fans. Even there, people say, “This is really cool, but I have to go out of my way to keep using it.”

Perhaps it would have been easier to bake it into my day-to-day habits if developer and content creator support had been more robust, a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

After a few weeks of using the new Vision Pro hardware refresh daily, it’s clear to me that the platform needs a bigger rethink. As a fan of the device, I’m concerned it won’t get that, because all the rumors point to Apple pouring its future resources into smart glasses, which, to me, are a completely different product category.

What changed in the new model?

For many users, the most notable change here will be something you can buy separately (albeit at great expense) for the old model: A new headband that balances the device’s weight on your head better, making it more comfortable to wear for long sessions.

Dubbed the Dual Knit Band, it comes with an ingeniously simple adjustment knob that can be used to tighten or loosen either the band that goes across the back of your head (similar to the old band) or the one that wraps around the top.

It’s well-designed, and it will probably make the Vision Pro easier to use for many people who found the old model to be too uncomfortable—even though this model is slightly heavier than its predecessor.

The band fit is adjusted with this knob. You can turn it to loosen or tighten one strap, then pull it out and turn it again to adjust the other. Credit: Samuel Axon

I’m one of the lucky few who never had any discomfort problems with the Vision Pro, but I know a bunch of folks who said the pressure the device put on their foreheads was unbearable. That’s exactly what this new band remedies, so it’s nice to see.

The M5 chip offers more than just speed

Whereas the first Vision Pro had Apple’s M2 chip—which was already a little behind the times when it launched—the new one adds the M5. It’s much faster, especially for graphics-processing and machine-learning tasks. We’ve written a lot about the M5 in our articles on other Apple products if you’re interested to learn more about it.

Functionally, this means a lot of little things are a bit faster, like launching certain applications or generating a Persona avatar. I’ll be frank: I didn’t notice any difference that significantly impacted the user experience. I’m not saying I couldn’t tell it was faster sometimes. I’m just saying it wasn’t faster in a way that’s meaningful enough to change any attitudes about the device.

It’s most noticeable with games—both native mixed-reality Vision Pro titles and the iPad versions of demanding games that you can run on a virtual display on the device. Demanding 3D games look and run nicer, in many cases. The M5 also supports more recent graphics advancements like ray tracing and mesh shading, though very few games support them, even in terms of iPad versions.

All this is to say that while I always welcome performance improvements, they are definitely not enough to convince an M2 Vision Pro owner to upgrade, and they won’t tip things over for anyone who has been on the fence about buying one of these things.

The main perk of the new chip is improved efficiency, which is the driving force behind modestly increased battery life. When I first took the M2 Vision Pro on a plane, I tried watching 2021’s Dune. I made it through the movie, but just barely; the battery ran out during the closing credits. It’s not a short movie, but there are longer ones.

Now, the new headset can easily get another 30 or 60 minutes, depending on what you’re doing, which finally puts it in “watch any movie you want” territory.

Given how short battery life was in the original version, even a modest bump like that makes a big difference. That, alongside a marginally increased field of view (about 10 percent) and a new 120 Hz maximum refresh rate for passthrough are the best things about the new hardware. These are nice-to-haves, but they’re not transformational by any means.

We already knew the Vision Pro offered excellent hardware (even if it’s overkill for most users), but the platform’s appeal is really driven by software. Unfortunately, this is where things are running behind expectations.

For content, it’s quality over quantity

When the first Vision Pro launched, I was bullish about the promise of the platform—but a lot of that was contingent on a strong content cadence and third-party developer support.

And as I’ve written since, the content cadence for the first year was a disappointment. Whereas I expected weekly episodes of Apple’s Immersive Videos in the TV app, those short videos arrived with gaps of several months. There’s an enormous wealth of great immersive content outside of Apple’s walled garden, but Apple didn’t seem interested in making that easily accessible to Vision Pro owners. Third-party apps did some of that work, but they lagged behind those on other platforms.

The first-party content cadence picked up after the first year, though. Plus, Apple introduced the Spatial Gallery, a built-in app that aggregates immersive 3D photos and the like. It’s almost TikTok-like in that it lets you scroll through short-form content that leverages what makes the device unique, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that the platform so badly needed at launch.

The Spatial Gallery is sort of like a horizontally-scrolling TikTok for 3D photos and video. Credit: Samuel Axon

The content that is there—whether in the TV app or the Spatial Gallery—is fantastic. It’s beautifully, professionally produced stuff that really leans on the hardware. For example, there is an autobiographical film focused on U2’s Bono that does some inventive things with the format that I had never seen or even imagined before.

Bono, of course, isn’t everybody’s favorite, but if you can stomach the film’s bloviating, it’s worth watching just with an eye to what a spatial video production can or should be.

I still think there’s significant room to grow, but the content situation is better than ever. It’s not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but it’s enough to make putting on the headset for a bit once a week or so worth it. That wasn’t there a year ago.

The software support situation is in a similar state.

App support is mostly frozen in the year 2024

Many of us have a suite of go-to apps that are foundational to our individual approaches to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, they are:

Firefox
Spark
Todoist
Obsidian
Raycast
Slack
Visual Studio Code
Claude
1Password

As you can see, I don’t use most of Apple’s built-in apps—no Safari, no Mail, no Reminders, no Passwords, no Notes… no Spotlight, even. All that may be atypical, but it has never been a problem on macOS, nor has it been on iOS for a few years now.

Impressively, almost all of these are available on visionOS—but only because it can run iPad apps as flat, virtual windows. Firefox, Spark, Todoist, Obsidian, Slack, 1Password, and even Raycast are all available as supported iPad apps, but surprisingly, Claude isn’t, even though there is a Claude app for iPads. (ChatGPT’s iPad app works, though.) VS Code isn’t available, of course, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.

Not a single one of these applications has a true visionOS app. That’s too bad, because I can think of lots of neat things spatial computing versions could do. Imagine browsing your Obsidian graph in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.

You can tell the native apps from the iPad ones: The iPad ones have rectangular icons nested within circles, whereas the native apps fill the whole circle. Credit: Samuel Axon

If you’re not such a huge productivity software geek like me and you use Apple’s built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly, there are still a few apps that you would imagine would have really cool spatial computing features—like Apple Maps—that don’t. Maps, too, is just an iPad app.

Even if you set productivity aside and focus on entertainment, there are still frustrating gaps. Almost two years later, there is still no Netflix or YouTube app. There are decent-enough third-party options for YouTube, but you have to watch Netflix in a browser, which is lower-quality than in a native app and looks horrible on one of the Vision Pro’s big virtual screens.

To be clear, there is a modest trickle of interesting spatial app experiences coming in—most of them games, educational apps, or cool one-off ideas that are fun to check out for a few minutes.

All this is to say that nothing has really changed since February 2024. There was an influx of apps at launch that included a small number of show-stoppers (mostly educational apps), but the rest ranged from “basically the iPad app but with one or two throwaway tech-demo-style spatial features you won’t try more than once” to “basically the iPad app but a little more native-feeling” to “literally just the iPad app.” As far as support from popular, cross-platform apps, it’s mostly the same list today as it was then.

Its killer app is that it’s a killer monitor

Even though Apple hasn’t made a big leap forward in developer support, it has made big strides in making the Vision Pro a nifty companion to the Mac.

From the start, it has had a feature that lets you simply look at a Mac’s built-in display, tap your fingers, and launch a large, resizable virtual monitor. I have my own big, multi-monitor setup at home, but I have used the Vision Pro this way sometimes when traveling.

I had some complaints at the start, though. It could only do one monitor, and that monitor was limited to 60 Hz and a standard widescreen resolution. That’s better than just using a 14-inch MacBook Pro screen, but it’s a far cry from the sort of high-end setup a $3,500 price tag suggests. Furthermore, it didn’t allow you to switch audio between the two devices.

Thanks to both software and hardware updates, that has all changed. visionOS now supports three different monitor sizes: the standard widescreen aspect ratio, a wider one that resembles a standard ultra-wide monitor, and a gigantic, ultra-ultra-wide wrap-around display that I can assure you will leave no one wanting for desktop space. It looks great. Problem solved! Likewise, it will now transfer your Mac audio to the Vision Pro or its Bluetooth headphones automatically.

All of that works not just on the new Vision Pro, but also on the M2 model. The new M5 model exclusively addresses the last of my complaints: You can now achieve higher refresh rates for that virtual monitor than 60 Hz. Apple says it goes “up to 120 Hz,” but there’s no available tool for measuring exactly where it’s landing. Still, I’m happy to see any improvement here.

This is the standard width for the Mac monitor feature… Samuel Axon

Through a series of updates, Apple has turned a neat proof-of-concept feature into something that is genuinely valuable—especially for folks who like ultra-wide or multi-monitor setups but have to travel a lot (like myself) or who just don’t want to invest in the display hardware at home.

You can also play your Mac games on this monitor. I tried playing No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 on it with a controller, and it was a fantastic experience.

This, alongside spatial video and watching movies, is the Vision Pro’s current killer app and one of the main areas where Apple has clearly put a lot of effort into improving the platform.

Stop trying to make Personas happen

Strangely, another area where Apple has invested quite a bit to make things better is in the Vision Pro’s usefulness as a communications and meetings device. Personas—the 3D avatars of yourself that you create for Zoom calls and the like—were absolutely terrible when the M2 Vision Pro came out.

There is also EyeSight, which uses your Persona to show a simulacrum of your eyes to people around you in the real world, letting them know you are aware of your surroundings and even allowing them to follow your gaze. I understand the thought behind this feature—Apple doesn’t want mixed reality to be socially isolating—but it sometimes puts your eyes in the wrong place, it’s kind of hard to see, and it honestly seems like a waste of expensive hardware.

Primarily via software updates, I’m pleased to report that Personas are drastically improved. Mine now actually looks like me, and it moves more naturally, too.

I joined a FaceTime call with Apple reps where they showed me how Personas float and emote around each other, and how we could look at the same files and assets together. It was indisputably cool and way better than before, thanks to the improved Personas.

I can’t say as much for EyeSight, which looks the same. It’s hard for me to fathom that Apple has put multiple sensors and screens on this thing to support this feature.

In my view, dropping EyeSight would be the single best thing Apple could do for this headset. Most people don’t like it, and most people don’t want it, yet there is no question that its inclusion adds a not-insignificant amount to both the price and the weight, the product’s two biggest barriers to adoption.

Likewise, Personas are theoretically cool, and it is a novel and fun experience to join a FaceTime call with people and see how it works and what you could do. But it’s just that: a novel experience. Once you’ve done it, you’ll never feel the need to do it again. I can barely imagine anyone who would rather show up to a call as a Persona than take the headset off for 30 minutes to dial in on their computer.

Much of this headset is dedicated to this idea that it can be a device that connects you with others, but maintaining that priority is simply the wrong decision. Mixed reality is isolating, and Apple is treating that like a problem to be solved, but I consider that part of its appeal.

If this headset were capable of out-in-the-world AR applications, I would not feel that way, but the Vision Pro doesn’t support any application that would involve taking it outside the home into public spaces. A lot of the cool, theoretical AR uses I can think of would involve that, but still no dice here.

The metaverse (it’s telling that this is the first time I’ve typed that word in at least a year) already exists: It’s on our phones, in Instagram and TikTok and WeChat and Fortnite. It doesn’t need to be invented, and it doesn’t need a new, clever approach to finally make it take off. It has already been invented. It’s already in orbit.

Like the iPad and the Apple Watch before it, the Vision Pro needs to stop trying to be a general-purpose device and instead needs to lean into what makes it special.

In doing so, it will become a better user experience, and it will get lighter and cheaper, too. There’s real potential there. Unfortunately, Apple may not go that route if leaks and insider reports are to be believed.

There’s still a ways to go, so hopefully this isn’t a dead end

The M5 Vision Pro was the first of four planned new releases in the product line, according to generally reliable industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Next up, he predicted, would be a full Vision Pro 2 release with a redesign, and a Vision Air, a cheaper, lighter alternative. Those would all precede true smart glasses many years down the road.

I liked that plan: keep the full-featured Vision Pro for folks who want the most premium mixed reality experience possible (but maybe drop EyeSight), and launch a cheaper version to compete more directly with headsets like Meta’s Quest line of products, or the newly announced Steam Frame VR headset from Valve, along with planned competitors by Google, Samsung, and others.

True augmented reality glasses are an amazing dream, but there are serious problems of optics and user experience that we’re still a ways off from solving before those can truly replace the smartphone as Tim Cook once predicted.

All that said, it looks like that plan has been called into question. A Bloomberg report in October claimed that Apple CEO Tim Cook had told employees that the company was redirecting resources from future passthrough HMD products to accelerate work on smart glasses.

Let’s be real: It’s always going to be a once-in-a-while device, not a daily driver. For many people, that would be fine if it cost $1,000. At $3,500, it’s still a nonstarter for most consumers.

I believe there is room for this product in the marketplace. I still think it’s amazing. It’s not going to be as big as the iPhone, or probably even the iPad, but it has already found a small audience that could grow significantly if the price and weight could come down. Removing all the hardware related to Personas and EyeSight would help with that.

I hope Apple keeps working on it. When Apple released the Apple Watch, it wasn’t entirely clear what its niche would be in users’ lives. The answer (health and fitness) became crystal clear over time, and the other ambitions of the device faded away while the company began building on top of what was working best.

You see Apple doing that a little bit with the expanded Mac spatial display functionality. That can be the start of an intriguing journey. But writers have a somewhat crass phrase: “kill your darlings.” It means that you need to be clear-eyed about your work and unsentimentally cut anything that’s not working, even if you personally love it—even if it was the main thing that got you excited about starting the project in the first place.

It’s past time for Apple to start killing some darlings with the Vision Pro, but I truly hope it doesn’t go too far and kill the whole platform.

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices Read More »

Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet

Apple, Apple M5, ipad, ipad pro, Reviews, Tech / Beth Washington / October 21, 2025

It’s a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

Apple’s 13-inch M5 iPad Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple generally does for its products for one or two or more years after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are still pretty exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some kind of task where they need it to work as hard and fast as it can, for an extended period of time. You could be a developer compiling a large and complex app, or you could be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and first- and third-party apps made to take advantage of that power and flexibility, mean that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it takes a few years for that speed to add up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple shifted to using the same M-series chips that it uses in Macs, most iPad Pro reviews contain some version of “this is great hardware that is much faster than it needs to be for anything the iPad does.” To wit, our review of the M4 iPad Pro from May 2024:

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that makes important and mostly welcome changes to how the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and some other kinds of background tasks. But this is the kind of thing that isn’t even going to stress out an Apple M1, let alone a chip that’s twice as powerful.

All of this is to say: A chip refresh for an iPad is nice to have. This year’s will also come with a handy RAM increase for many buyers, the first RAM boost that the base model iPad Pro has gotten in more than four years.

But without any other design changes or other improvements to hang its hat on, the fact is that chip refresh years for the iPad Pro only really improve a part of the tablet that needs the least amount of improvement. That doesn’t make them bad; who knows what the hardware requirements will be when iPadOS 30 adds some other batch of multitasking features. But it does mean these refreshes don’t feel particularly exciting or necessary; the most exciting thing about the M5 iPad Pro means you might be able to get a good deal on an M4 model as retailers clear out their stock. You aren’t going to notice the difference.

Design: M4 iPad Pro redux

The 13-inch M5 iPad Pro in its Magic Keyboard accessory with the Apple Pencil Pro attached. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Lest we downplay this tablet’s design, the M4 version of the iPad Pro was the biggest change to the tablet since Apple introduced the modern all-screen design for the iPad Pro back in 2018. It wasn’t a huge departure, but it did introduce the iPad’s first OLED display, a thinner and lighter design, and a slightly improved Apple Pencil and updated range of accessories.

As with the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that Apple just launched, the easiest way to know how much you’ll like the iPad Pro depends on how you feel about screen technology (the iPad is, after all, mostly screen). If you care about the 120 Hz, high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen, the option to add a nano-texture display with a matte finish, and the infinite contrast and boosted brightness of Apple’s OLED displays, those are the best reasons to buy an iPad Pro. The $299/349 Magic Keyboard accessory for the iPad Pro also comes with backlit keys and a slightly larger trackpad than the equivalent $269/$319 iPad Air accessory.

If none of those things inspire passion in you, or if they’re not worth several hundred extra dollars to you—the nano-texture glass upgrade alone adds $700 to the price of the iPad Pro, because Apple only offers it on the 1TB and 2TB models—then the 11- and 13-inch iPads Air are going to give you a substantively identical experience. That includes compatibility with the same Apple Pencil accessory and support for all the same multitasking and Apple Intelligence features.

The M5 iPad Pro supports the same Apple Pencil Pro as the M4 iPad Pro, and the M2 and M3 iPad Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One other internal change to the new iPad Pro, aside from the M5, is mostly invisible: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread connectivity provided by the Apple N1 chip, and 5G cellular connectivity provided by the Apple C1X. Ideally, you won’t notice this swap at all, but it’s a quietly momentous change for Apple. Both of these chips cap several years of acquisitions and internal development, and further reduce Apple’s reliance on external chipmakers like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which has been one of the goals of Apple’s A- and M-series processors all along.

There’s one last change we haven’t really been able to adequately test in the handful of days we’ve had the tablet: new fast-charging support, either with Apple’s first-party Dynamic Power Adapter or any USB-C charger capable of providing 60 W or more of power. When using these chargers, Apple says the tablet’s battery can charge from 0 to 50 percent in 35 minutes. (Apple provides the same battery life estimates for the M5 iPads as the M4 models: 10 hours of Wi-Fi web usage, or 9 hours of cellular web usage, for both the 13- and 11-inch versions of the tablet.)

Two Apple M5 chips, two RAM options

Apple sent us the 1TB version of the 13-inch iPad Pro to test, which means we got the fully enabled version of the M5: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency GPU cores, 10 GPU cores, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of RAM.

Apple’s Macs still offer individually configurable processor, storage, and RAM upgrades to users—generally buying one upgrade doesn’t lock you into buying a bunch of other stuff you don’t want or need (though there are exceptions for RAM configurations in some of the higher-end Macs). But for the iPads, Apple still ties the chip and the RAM you get to storage capacity. The 256GB and 512GB iPads get three high-performance CPU cores instead of four, and 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB.

For people who buy the 256GB and 512GB iPads, this does amount to a 50 percent increase in RAM capacity from the M1, M2, and M4 iPad Pro models, or the M1, M2, and M3 iPad Airs, all of which came with 8GB of RAM. High-end models stick with the same 16GB of RAM as before (no 24GB or 32GB upgrades here, though the M5 supports them in Macs). The ceiling is in the same place, but the floor has come up.

Given that iPadOS is still mostly running on tablets with 8GB or less of RAM, I don’t expect the jump from 8GB to 12GB to make a huge difference in the day-to-day experience of using the tablet, at least for now. If you connect your iPad to an external monitor that you use as an extended display, it might help keep more apps in memory at a time; it could help if you edit complex multi-track audio or video files or images, or if you’re trying to run some kind of machine learning or AI workflows locally. Future iPadOS versions could also require more than 8GB of memory for some features. But for now, the benefit exists mostly on paper.

As for benchmarks, the M5’s gains in the iPad are somewhat more muted than they are for the M5 MacBook Pro we tested. We observed a 10 or 15 percent improvement across single- and multi-core CPU tests and graphics benchmark improvements that mostly hovered in the 15 to 30 percent range. The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark was one outlier, pointing to a 35 percent increase in GPU performance; it’s possible that GPU or rendering-heavy workloads benefit a little more from the new neural accelerators in the M5’s GPU cores than games do.

In the MacBook review, we observed that the M5’s CPU generally had higher peak power consumption than the M4. In the fanless iPad Pro, it’s likely that Apple has reined the chip in a little bit to keep it cool, which would explain why the iPad’s M5 doesn’t see quite the same gains.

The M5 and the 12GB RAM minimum does help to put a little more distance between the M3 iPad Air and the Pros. Most iPad workloads don’t benefit in an obvious user-noticeable way from the extra performance or memory right now, but it’s something you can point to that makes the Pro more “pro” than the Air.

Changed hardware that doesn’t change much

The M5 iPad Pro is nice in the sense that “getting a little more for your money today than you could get for the same money two weeks ago” is nice. But it changes essentially nothing for potential iPad buyers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who would be well-served by the M5 iPad Pro who wouldn’t have been equally well-served by the M4 version. And if the M4 iPad Pro was already overkill for you, the M5 is just a little more so. Particularly if you have an M1 or M2 ; People with an A12X or A12Z version of the iPad Pro from 2018 or 2020 will benefit more, particularly if you’re multitasking a lot or running into limitations or RAM complaints from the apps you’re using.

But even with the iPadOS 26 update, it still seems like the capabilities of the iPad’s software lags behind the capabilities of the hardware by a few years. It’s to be expected, maybe, for an operating system that has to run on this M5 iPad Pro and a 7-year-old phone processor with 3GB of RAM.

I am starting to feel the age of the M1 MacBook Air I use, especially if I’m pushing multiple monitors with it or trying to exceed its 16GB RAM limit. The M1 iPad Air I have, on the other hand, feels like it just got an operating system that unlocks some of its latent potential. That’s the biggest problem with the iPad Pro, really—not that it’s a bad tablet, but that it’s still so much more tablet than you need to do what iPadOS and its apps can currently do.

The good

A fast, beautiful tablet that’s a pleasure to use.
The 120Hz ProMotion support and OLED display panel make this one of Apple’s best screens, period.
256GB and 512GB models get a bump from 8GB to 12GB of memory.
Maintains compatibility with the same accessories as the M4 iPad Pro.

The bad

More iPad than pretty much anyone needs.
Passively cooled fanless Apple M5 can’t stretch its legs quite as much as the actively cooled Mac version.
Expensive accessories.

The ugly

All other hardware upgrades, including the matte nano-texture display finish, require a $600 upgrade to the 1TB version of the tablet.

Testing Apple’s M5 iPad Pro: Future-proofing for Apple’s perennial overkill tablet Read More »

MacBook Pro: Apple’s most awkward laptop is the first to show off Apple M5

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, Features, MacBook, MacBook Pro, macOS, Reviews, Tech / 9u50fv / October 21, 2025

the apple m5: one more than m4

Apple M5 trades blows with Pro and Max chips from older generations.

Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

When I’m asked to recommend a Mac laptop for people, Apple’s low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro usually gets lost in the shuffle. It competes with the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air, significantly cheaper computers that meet or exceed the “good enough” boundary for the vast majority of computer users. The basic MacBook Pro also doesn’t have the benefit of Apple’s Pro or Max-series chips, which come with many more CPU cores, substantially better graphics performance, and higher memory capacity for true professionals and power users.

But the low-end Pro makes sense for a certain type of power user. At $1,599, it’s the cheapest way to get Apple’s best laptop screen, with mini LED technology, a higher 120 Hz ProMotion refresh rate for smoother scrolling and animations, and the optional but lovely nano-texture (read: matte) finish. Unlike the MacBook Air, it comes with a cooling fan, which has historically meant meaningfully better sustained performance and less performance throttling. And it’s also Apple’s cheapest laptop with three Thunderbolt ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card slot, all genuinely useful for people who want to plug lots of things in without having multiple dongles or a bulky dock competing for the Air’s two available ports.

If you don’t find any of those arguments in the basic MacBook Pro’s favor convincing, that’s fine. The new M5 version makes almost no changes to the laptop other than the chip, so it’s unlikely to change your calculus if you already looked at the M3 or M4 version and passed it up. But it is the first Mac to ship with the M5, the first chip in Apple’s fifth-generation chip family and a preview of what’s to come for (almost?) every other Mac in the lineup. So you can at least be interested in the 14-inch MacBook Pro as a showcase for a new processor, if not as a retail product in and of itself.

The Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, take five

Apple has been using this laptop design for about four years now, since it released the M1 Pro and M1 Max versions of the MacBook Pro in late 2021. But for people who are upgrading from an older design—Apple did use the old Intel-era design, Touch Bar and all, for the low-end M1 and M2 MacBook Pros, after all—we’ll quickly hit the highlights.

This basic MacBook Pro only comes in a 14-inch screen size, up from 13-inches for the old low-end MacBook Pro, but some of that space is eaten up by the notch across the top of the display. The strips of screen on either side of the notch are usable by macOS, but only for the menu bar and icons that live in the menu bar—it’s a no-go zone for apps. The laptop is a consistent thickness throughout, rather than tapered, and has somewhat more squared-off and less-rounded corners.

Compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the 14-inch version is the same thickness, but it’s a little heavier (3.4 pounds, compared to 3), wider, and deeper. For most professional users, the extra screen size and the re-addition of the HDMI port and SD card slot mostly justify the slight bump up in size. The laptop also includes three Thunderbolt 3 ports—up from two in the MacBook Airs—and the resurrected MagSafe charging port. But it is worth noting that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is nearly identical in weight to the 15-inch MacBook Air. If screen size is all you’re after, the Air may still be the better choice.

Apple’s included charger uses MagSafe on the laptop end, but USB-C chargers, docks, monitors, and other accessories will continue to charge the laptop if that’s what you prefer to keep using.

I’ve got no gripes about Apple’s current laptop keyboard—Apple uses the same key layout, spacing, and size across the entire MacBook Air and Pro line, though if I had to distinguish between the Pro and Air, I’d say the Pro’s keyboard is very, very slightly firmer and more satisfying to type on and that the force feedback of its trackpad is just a hair more clicky. The laptop’s speaker system is also more impressive than either MacBook Air, with much bassier bass and a better dynamic range.

But the main reason to prefer this low-end Pro to the Air is the screen, particularly the 120 Hz ProMotion support, the improved brightness and contrast of the mini LED display technology, and the option to add Apple’s matte nano texture finish. I usually don’t mind the amount of glare coming off my MacBook Air’s screen too much, but every time I go back to using a nano-texture screen I’m always a bit jealous of the complete lack of glare and reflections and the way you get those benefits without dealing with the dip in image quality you see from many matte-textured screen protectors. The more you use your laptop outdoors or under lighting conditions you can’t control, the more you’ll appreciate it.

The optional nano texture display adds a pleasant matte finish to the screen, but that notch is still notching. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If the higher refresh rate and the optional matte coating (a $150 upgrade on top of an already pricey computer) don’t appeal to you, or if you can’t pay for them, then you can be pretty confident that this isn’t the MacBook for you. The 13-inch Air is lighter, and the 5-inch Air is larger, and both are cheaper. But we’re still only a couple of years past the M2 version of the low-end MacBook Pro, which didn’t give you the extra ports or the Pro-level screen.

But! Before you buy one of the still-M4-based MacBook Airs, our testing of the MacBook Pro’s new M5 chip should give you some idea of whether it’s worth waiting a few months (?) for an Air refresh.

Testing Apple’s M5

We’ve also run some M5 benchmarks as part of our M5 iPad Pro review, but having macOS rather than iPadOS running on top of it does give us a lot more testing flexibility—more benchmarks and a handful of high-end games to run, plus access to the command line for taking a look at power usage and efficiency.

To back up and re-state the chip’s specs for a moment, though, the M5 is constructed out of the same basic parts as the M4: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores (up from four in the M1/M2/M3), 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine for handling some machine-learning and AI workloads.

The M5’s technical improvements are more targeted and subtle than just a boost to clock speeds or core counts. The first is a 27.5 percent increase in memory bandwidth, from the 120 GB/s of the M4 to 153 GB/s (achieved, I’m told, by a combination of faster RAM and the memory fabric that facilitates communication between different areas of the chip. Integrated GPUs are usually bottlenecked by memory bandwidth first and core count second, so memory bandwidth improvements can have a pretty direct, linear impact on graphics performance.

Apple also says it has added a “Neural Accelerator” to each of its GPU cores, separate from the Neural Engine. These will benefit a few specific types of workloads—things like MetalFX graphics upscaling or frame generation that would previously have had to use the Neural Engine can now do that work entirely within the GPU, eliminating a bit of latency and freeing the Neural Engine up to do other things. Apple is also claiming “over 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4,” which Apple says will speed up locally run AI language models and image generation software. That figure is coming mostly from the GPU improvements; according to Geekbench AI, the Neural Engine itself is only around 10 percent faster than the one on the M4.

(A note about testing: The M4 chip in these charts was in an iMac and not a MacBook Pro. But over several hardware generations, we’ve observed that the actively cooled versions of the basic M-series chips perform the same in both laptops and desktops. Comparing the M5 to the passively cooled M4 in the MacBook Air isn’t apples to apples, but comparing it to the M4 in the iMac is.)

Each of Apple’s chip generations has improved over the previous one by low-to-mid double digits, and the M5 is no different. We measured a 12 to 16 percent improvement over the M4 in single-threaded CPU tests, a 20 to 30 percent improvement in multicore tests, and roughly a 40 percent improvement in graphics benchmarks and the Mac version of the built-in Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark (one benchmark, the GPU-based version of the Blender rendering benchmark, measured a larger 60 to 70 percent improvement for the M5’s GPU, suggesting it either benefits more than most apps from the memory bandwidth improvements or the new neural accelerators).

Those performance additions add up over time. The M5 is typically a little over twice as fast as the M1, and it comes close to the performance level of some Pro and Max processors from past generations.

The M5 MacBook Pro falls short of the M4 Pro, and it will fall even shorter of the M5 Pro whenever it arrives. But its CPU performance generally beats the M3 Pro in our tests, and its GPU performance comes pretty close. Its multi-core CPU performance beats the M1 Max, and its single-core performance is over 80 percent faster. The M5 can’t come close to the graphics performance of any of these older Max or Ultra chips, but if you’re doing primarily CPU-heavy work and don’t need more than 32GB of RAM, the M5 holds up astonishingly well to Apple’s high-end silicon from just a few years ago.

It wasn’t so long ago that this kind of performance improvement was more-or-less normal across the entire tech industry, but Intel, AMD, and Nvidia’s consumer CPUs and GPUs have really slowed their rate of improvement lately, and Intel and AMD are both guilty of re-using old silicon for entry-level chips, over and over again. If you’re using a 6- or 7-year-old PC, sure, you’ll see performance improvements from something new, but it’s more of a crapshoot for a 3- to 4-year-old PC.

If there’s a downside to the M5 in our testing, it’s that its performance improvements seem to come with increased power draw relative to the M4 when all the CPU cores are engaged in heavy lifting. According to macOS built-in powermetrics tool, the M5 drew an average 28 W of power in our Handbrake video encoding test, compared to around 17 W for the M4 running the same test.

Using software tools to compare power draw between different chip manufacturers or even chip generations is dicey, because you’re trusting that different hardware is reporting its power use to the operating system in similar ways. But assuming they’re accurate, these numbers suggest that Apple could be pushing clock speeds more aggressively this generation to squeeze more performance out of the chip.

This would make some sense, since the third-generation 3nm TSMC manufacturing process used for the M5 (likely N3P) looks like a fairly mild upgrade from the second-generation 3nm process used for the M4 (N3E). TSMC says that N3P can boost performance by 5 percent at the same power use compared to N3E, or reduce power draw by 5 to 10 percent at the same performance. To get to the larger double-digit performance improvements that Apple is claiming and that we measured in our testing, you’d definitely expect to see the overall power consumption increase.

To put the M5 in context, the M2 and the M3 came a bit closer to its average power draw in our video encoding test (23.2 and 22.7 W, respectively), and the M5’s power draw comes in much lower than any past-generation Pro or Max chips. In terms of the amount of power used to complete the same task, the M5’s efficiency is worse than the M4’s according to powermetrics, but better than older generations. And Apple’s performance and power efficiency remains well ahead of what Intel or AMD can offer in their high-end products.

Impressive chip, awkward laptop

The low-end MacBook Pro has always occupied an odd in-between place in Apple’s lineup, overlapping in a lot of places with the MacBook Air and without the benefit of the much-faster chips that the 15- and 16-inch MacBook Pros could fit. The M5 MacBook Pro carries on that complicated legacy, and even with the M5 there are still lots of people for whom one of the M4 MacBook Airs is just going to be a better fit.

But it is a very nice laptop, and if your screen is the most important part of your laptop, this low-end Pro does make a decent case for itself. It’s frustrating that the matte display is a $150 upcharge, but it’s an option you can’t get on an Air, and the improved display panel and faster ProMotion refresh rate make scrolling and animations all look smoother and more fluid than they do on an Air’s screen. I still mostly think that this is a laptop without a huge constituency—too much more expensive than the Air, too much slower than the other Pros—but the people who buy it for the screen should still be mostly happy with the performance and ports.

This MacBook Pro is more exciting to me as a showcase for the Apple M5—and I’m excited to see the M5 and its higher-end Pro, Max, and (possibly) Ultra relatives show up in other Macs.

The M5 sports the highest sustained power draw of any M-series chip we’ve tested, but Apple’s past generations (the M4 in particular) have been so efficient that Apple has some room to bump up power consumption while remaining considerably more efficient than anything its competitors are offering. What you get in exchange is an impressively fast chip, as good or better than many of the Pro or Max chips in previous-generation products. For anyone still riding out the tail end of the Intel era, or for people with M1-class Macs that are showing their age, the M5 is definitely fast enough to feel like a real upgrade. That’s harder to come by in computing than it used to be.

The good

M5 is a solid performer that shows how far Apple has come since the M1.
Attractive, functional design, with a nice keyboard and trackpad, great-sounding speakers, a versatile selection of ports, and Apple’s best laptop screen.
Optional nano-texture display finish looks lovely and eliminates glare.

The bad

Harder to recommend than Apple’s other laptops if you don’t absolutely require a ProMotion screen.
A bit heavier than other laptops in its size class (and barely lighter than the 15-inch MacBook Air).
M5 can use more power than M4 did.

The ugly

High price for RAM and storage upgrades, and a $150 upsell for the nano-textured display.

MacBook Pro: Apple’s most awkward laptop is the first to show off Apple M5 Read More »

Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, ipad pro, Tech / Kelly Newman / October 15, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, a YouTuber unboxed what appeared to be a refreshed iPad Pro in full retail packaging, suggesting it would be launching imminently. Today, Apple formally announced the new tablets, and it looks like pretty much everything uncovered by that YouTuber turned out to be accurate.

The new iPad Pros, powered by Apple’s also-new M5 chip, use the same basic designs as the M4 iPad Pros from last year and are compatible with the same cases and accessories. The new iPad Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch model, is available for pre-order today, and ships on October 22.

Apple’s M5 is similar in composition to the M4—the fully enabled version uses four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. But a memory bandwidth increase, from 120GB/s for the M4 to 153GB/s for the M5, enables a disproportionately large 45 percent increase to graphics performance, according to Apple’s estimates. Apple’s press release also highlighted improvements to storage performance, with “up to 2x faster storage read and write speeds.”

Apple unveils M5 update for the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pros Read More »

New Apple M5 is the centerpiece of an updated 14-inch MacBook Pro

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, MacBook Pro, Tech / 9u50fv / October 15, 2025

Apple often releases a smaller second wave of new products in October after the dust settles from its September iPhone announcement, and this year that wave revolves around its brand-new M5 chip. The first Mac to get the new processor will be the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, which the company announced today on its press site alongside a new M5 iPad Pro and an updated version of the Vision Pro headset.

But unlike the last couple MacBook Pro refreshes, Apple isn’t ready with Pro and Max versions of the M5 for higher-end 14-inch MacBook Pros and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Those models will continue to use the M4 Pro and M4 Max for now, and we probably shouldn’t expect an update for them until sometime next year.

Aside from the M5, the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro has essentially identical specs to the outgoing M4 version. It has a notched 14-inch screen with ProMotion support and a 3024×1964 resolution, three USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, and a 12 MP Center Stage webcam. It still weighs 3.4 pounds, and Apple still estimates the battery should last for “up to 16 hours” of wireless web browsing and up to 24 hours of video streaming. The main internal difference is an option for a 4TB storage upgrade, which will run you $1,200 if you’re upgrading from the base 512GB SSD.

New Apple M5 is the centerpiece of an updated 14-inch MacBook Pro Read More »