Apple announced new laptops Tuesday morning, including new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models powered by Apple’s M5 chip. The Pro models were announced alongside the brand new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which Apple describes as its most advanced CPU cores to date.
The company says these updated M5 chips are specifically designed to help MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops better handle the intensive AI tasks that are becoming the focus of new Apple hardware. According to Apple, both the new Air and Pro laptops can handle AI tasks up to four times faster than their respective predecessors, the M4.
These AI-centric upgrades may not be immediately noticeable to more casual users who aren’t looking to run a compute-intensive network of AI agents or produce fast 3D renderings. But these advances have trickled down to other aspects of laptops as well.
MacBook Air users get perks like 18 hours of battery life (a six-hour improvement compared to the latest Intel-based Apple laptops in 2020), as well as a 12MP center-stage camera for video calls, a three-microphone array, and a sound system with support for spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. The MacBook Air comes with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a MagSafe charging port, and a classic 3.5mm headphone jack.
The new MacBook Air lineup consists of a 13-inch model (starting at $1,099) and a 15-inch model (starting at $1,299) in sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver color options. The Air also comes with 512GB of initial storage, double the base storage capacity of its predecessor.
As always, the MacBook Pro is aimed at more technical users, especially developers working with AI. M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are up to 4x faster than M4 Pro and M4 Max for LLM prompt processing and up to 8x faster than M1 Pro and M1 Max for AI image generation.
Apple says this will allow AI researchers and developers to train custom models on their devices, and creative users will benefit from faster 3D rendering, video editing, and music production tasks.
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MacBook Pro also features up to 2x faster read/write performance than previous generations, starting with 1 TB of storage on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and 2 TB of storage on MacBook Pro with M5 Max. Apple says these laptops will have up to 24 hours of battery life, and with a 96W or higher USB-C adapter, users can charge the battery to 50% in 30 minutes. This laptop supports Thunderbolt 5 and has a 6-speaker sound system.
14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with the M5 Pro chip start at $2,199 and $2,699, respectively, and models with the M5 Max chip start at $3,599 and $3,899, and are available in black or silver.
All of these laptops will be available for pre-order starting Tuesday, March 4th, and will be available starting Wednesday, March 11th.
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