The 14-inch MacBook Pro is the first Mac to get Apple’s new M5 chip

As expected, Apple has a new MacBook. Meet the new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro.

This is mostly a spec-bump update. The display is a 14.2-inch Liquid XDR display, and it still has three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, a single HDMI port, and an SDXC card slot. Dimensions and weight are unchanged.

The big news is under the hood, the 14-inch MacBook Pro now comes with the new M5 chip. Apple, as usual, is coy about the specifics, but the core configuration of the M5 chip appears to be the same.

Even though it still has a 10-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, Apple says multithreaded performance is up to 20% faster. It still comes with a 10-core GPU, but each GPU core now has a Neural Accelerator for improved AI performance. Apple claims the M5 chip delivers up to 3.5 times the AI performance of the M4 chip, and 6 times the AI performance of the M1 chip. It comes with 16GB of memory as standard, with the option to increase it to 24GB and 32GB.

The new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro also gets two times faster SSD storage, which will improve the loading times of LLMs and transfer times of large video files. Customers can now also spec their 14-inch MacBook Pros with up to 4TB of storage, though that will come with a hefty upgrade fee.

While we definitely welcome the faster M5 chip and SSD storage, it’s sad to see that Apple hasn’t updated its connectivity. It still only supports the older Wi-Fi 6E standard and not the newer Wi-Fi 7 wireless standard.

Availability and pricing

Pre-orders for the new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro start on 17 October, and it will be available in stores on 22 October. Prices start at S$2,199, and there will be three off-the-shelf variants available. You should be able to find it on Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.

Apart from the 14-inch MacBook Pro, Apple also announced a new iPad Pro with the M5 chip and a new Vision Pro with the M5 chip, which you can read about below.