Apple MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max announced

Apple is upgrading its most powerful laptop

• 🆕 Apple has refreshed its MacBook Pro line with the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chip

• 💪 The new chips offer a 30% boost in CPU performance and 35% GPU performance when using ray tracing

• 📆 The new MacBook Pro models are available to pre-order March 4 and will be available March 11

• 💰 Prices start from $2,199 for the 14-inch M5 Pro model and $2,699 for the 16-inch M5 Pro model

Apple has unveiled its new lineup of MacBook Pro models, which are powered by its latest M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, with pre-orders starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning March 11.

The M5 Pro chip and M5 Max are “the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops” according to Apple, and are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture.

The design combines two dies into a single system on chip (SoC) and the M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture, which results in a 30 percent boost for pro workloads.

The GPU has also been improved to 40-cores, and offers 35 percent more performance for apps using ray tracing than M4 Pro and M4 Max. Apple is also promising 2x SSD speeds and 1TB of starting storage.

The new MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch models with M5 Pro and M5 Max start at $2,199 for the 14-inch M5 Pro and $3,599 for the 16-inch M5 Pro. The 14-inch M5 Max starts at $2,699 and $3,899 for the M5 Max.

Apple says the M5 Pro chip is designed to handle demanding workflows, which data modelers, post-production sound designers and STEM students may need, while the M5 Max chip is designed for 3D animators, app developers, and AI researchers who run workloads that demand maximum GPU compute and the highest memory bandwidth.

(Credit: Apple)

“M5 Pro and M5 Max are a monumental leap forward for Apple silicon, leveraging our new Fusion Architecture to scale the capabilities of Apple silicon while preserving its core tenets of performance, power efficiency, and unified memory architecture,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “Both chips underscore our relentless pace of innovation, integrating the world’s fastest CPU cores, a next-generation GPU with Neural Accelerators, a faster Neural Engine, and high-bandwidth, high-capacity memory — resulting in an unparalleled combination of performance, efficiency, and incredible on-device AI capabilities for MacBook Pro.”

M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a number of additional advanced technologies right on the chip, including:

• A faster 16-core Neural Engine with a higher bandwidth connection to memory to accelerate on-device AI features and Apple Intelligence

• Apple’s latest Media Engine with support for hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC, AV1 decode, and ProRes encode and decode engines

• Support for Memory Integrity Enforcement — an industry-first, always-on memory safety protection that does not compromise device performance

• Thunderbolt 5 ports, each supported by its own custom-designed controller directly on the chip — making this the industry’s most capable implementation of Thunderbolt 5

Up next: Apple announces iPhone 17e and new iPad Air powered by M4

Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. He also runs a retro gaming YouTube channel called Game on, boy! Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.