Apple announced its new line of laptops on Tuesday morning, including the new ones MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models using Apple’s M5 chip. The Pro models were revealed alongside the all-new ones M5 Pro and M5 Max chipswhich Apple describes as its most advanced CPU cores.
The company said these updated M5 chips were specifically designed to make MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops better at handling AI-intensive tasks, which are increasingly becoming a focal point for Apple’s new hardware. Both the new Air and Pro laptops can handle AI tasks up to 4x faster than their respective M4 predecessors, according to Apple.
These AI-centric upgrades may not be immediately visible to more casual users who aren’t trying to run a computationally intensive network of AI agents or create fast 3D renderings. But these developments permeate other aspects of portable computing as well.
MacBook Air users get perks like 18 hours of battery life (a six-hour improvement over Apple’s latest Intel-based laptops from 2020), as well as a 12MP Center Stage camera for video calls, a three-microphone 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 classic 3.5mm headphone jack.
The new MacBook Air lineup includes a 13-inch model (starting at $1,099) and a 15-inch model (starting at $1,299), with color options in sky blue, midnight, starlight and silver. The Air also now comes with 512GB of initial storage, doubling the base storage capacity of the previous model.
As usual, 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 direct LLM processing than the M4 Pro and M4 Max, and up to 8x faster in AI imaging than the M1 Pro and M1 Max.
Apple says this enables AI researchers and developers to train custom models on their device, and creative users could benefit from faster 3D rendering, video editing and music production.
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MacBook Pro also features up to 2x faster read/write performance than the previous generation and will start at 1 TB of storage for MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and 2 TB for MacBook Pro with M5 Max. Apple says these laptops have up to 24 hours of battery life, and with a 96W USB-C adapter or higher, users can charge up to 50% of the battery in 30 minutes. The laptops support Thunderbolt 5 and have a six-speaker sound system.
14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro chips start at $2,199 and $2,699, respectively, while 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 4th March and will be available from Wednesday 11th March.
