Apple announced its new lineup of laptops on Tuesday morning, including new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models that use Apple’s M5 chips. The Pro models are powered by the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which Apple describes as the most advanced CPU cores yet.
The company said that these updated M5 chips are specifically designed to make MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops better at handling intensive AI tasks, which are becoming a major focus of Apple’s new hardware. Both the new Air and Pro laptops can handle AI tasks up to 4x faster than the previous M4, according to Apple.
This AI-centric development may not be immediately apparent to casual users who are not trying to implement a robust computational network of AI agents or generate fast 3D renderings. But this development extends to other aspects of laptops.
MacBook Air users get benefits such as 18 hours of battery life (an improvement of six hours compared to the last Intel-based Apple laptops from 2020), as well as a 12MP Center Stage camera for video calls, a three-mic array, and a sound system that supports Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos. The MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a MagSafe charging port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The new MacBook Air lineup includes a 13-inch (starting at $1099) and a 15-inch model (starting at $1299), with color options of sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver. The Air also now comes with 512 GB of primary storage, doubling the base capacity of the previous model.
As always, the MacBook Pro is aimed at more technical users, especially developers working with AI. The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are up to 4x faster in LLM processing than the M4 Pro and M4 Max, and up to 8x faster in AI image generation than the M1 Pro and M1 Max.
Apple says this enables AI researchers and developers to train custom models on their device, and smart users can benefit from faster 3D rendering, video editing, and music production work.
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The MacBook Pro also has up to 2x faster read/write performance than the last generation, and will start at 1TB of storage space for the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro, and 2TB for the MacBook Pro with the M5 Max. Apple says these laptops have up to 24 hours of battery life, and with a 96W USB-C adapter or more, users can charge the battery to 50% in thirty minutes. The laptops support Thunderbolt 5 and have a six-speaker audio system.
The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro chips start at $2,199 and $2,699, respectively, while the models with M5 Max chips start at $3,599 and $3,899, available in black or silver.
All of these laptops will be available for pre-order on Tuesday, March 4, and will be available starting Wednesday, March 11.
