Apple's new M5 MacBooks deliver more performance, but at a higher price

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Following yesterday’s announcement of the M4 iPad Air and iPhone 17e, Apple is already back with more. This time, it’s refreshing two of its most popular laptops: the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro.

First up is the MacBook Air. Apple has officially updated it with the new M5 chipset, which the company says delivers up to 9.5x faster performance than the M1 MacBook Air and up to 4x faster AI performance compared to last year’s M4 MacBook Air.

Beyond the new chip, Apple has also doubled the base storage. The M5 MacBook Air now starts at 512GB, up from 256GB on the M4 model.

While both of those upgrades sound great, unfortunately, there’s a catch. The M5 MacBook Air is getting a price bump. The 13-inch model now starts at $1,100, which is $100 more than the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air. The 15-inch version sees the same increase, now starting at $1,300 — again, $100 more than last year’s model.

The M5 MacBook Air will be available for pre-order on March 4 and will launch on March 11.

Operating System: macOS 26
CPU: M5
RAM: 16GB, 24GB
Storage: 512GB, 1TB, 2TB

The M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro are finally here

Both laptops include 1TB of base storage

Last year, Apple refreshed the MacBook Pro with the base M5 chip but held back the M5 Pro and M5 Max models. Today, those higher-end versions have finally arrived.

According to Apple, the M5 Pro model packs an 18-core CPU and a 20-core GPU. The company says it delivers up to 30 percent more multithreaded performance in “pro workloads,” along with 4x the peak GPU compute of the M4 Pro and 6x the peak GPU compute of the M1 Pro for AI tasks.

As for the M5 Max, it steps things up with an 18-core CPU and a massive 40-core GPU — double the GPU cores of the M5 Pro. Apple says that translates to up to 20 percent better graphics performance than the M4 Max and up to 2.2x higher performance compared to the M1 Max.

Storage is also getting a bump. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models now start with 1TB of base storage, up from the 512GB base configuration on the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Apple also says the storage is faster,

Like the M5 MacBook Air, though, prices are going up. The 14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro now starts at $2,200, which is a $200 increase over the M4 Pro model. The 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro now starts at $3,600.

Both laptops will be available for pre-order on March 4 and officially launch on March 11, the same time frame as the new iPhone 17e, M4 iPad Air, and the M5 MacBook Air.