Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro gets an M5 chip bump and faster storage

Apple is refreshing its 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new processor. Announced this morning via press release, the entry-level MacBook Pro now features an M5 chip, faster storage, and a claimed 24 hours of battery life. The rest of the design remains the same, and the price still starts at $1,599 for a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 16GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. Preorders are available now, with availability expected October 22nd.

Apple claims the M5 chip is 3.5x faster at AI tasks than the M4, thanks to a next-gen 10-core GPU with “a Neural Accelerator in each core.” The new GPU also means 1.6x faster graphics performance and up to 1.6x higher frame rates in games over the M4 MacBook Pro. Multithreaded performance is also increased by 20 percent, and the M5 chip in the 14-inch Pro also has higher memory bandwidth of 153Gbps (the M4 had 120Gbps). For storage, users can now choose up to a 4TB SSD — previously only available if you upgraded to the M4 Pro chip.

Last year, Apple’s lower-cost Pro laptop saw a nice revision with the M4 chip, the addition of a third USB-C / Thunderbolt 4 port, and the option for an anti-glare display. It proved a big quality-of-life improvement over the M3 generation before it, and became one of my personal favorites for students and content creation.

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