Apple unveils new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M5

Apple announced a new slate of laptops on Tuesday morning, including new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models that use Apple’s M5 chips. The Pro models were unveiled alongside the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, which Apple describes as their most advanced CPU cores yet.

The company said these updated M5 chips are specifically designed to make MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops better at handling intensive AI tasks, which have become more of a focal point for Apple’s new devices. Both the new Air and Pro laptops can handle AI tasks up to 4 times faster than their M4 predecessors, according to Apple.

These AI-driven upgrades may not be immediately noticeable to casual users who aren’t trying to run a computationally intensive network of AI agents or create fast 3D renders. But these advances permeate other aspects of laptops as well.

MacBook Air users get perks like up to 18 hours of battery life (a six-hour improvement over Apple’s latest Intel-based laptops as of 2020), as well as a 12-megapixel central 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 sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver color options. The Air also comes with 512GB of primary storage, doubling the base storage capacity of the previous model.

As usual, the MacBook Pro is geared toward more technical users, especially developers who work with artificial intelligence. The M5 Pro and M5 Max chipsets are up to 4x faster at LLM processing than M4 Pro and M4 Max, and up to 8x faster at AI image creation compared to M1 Pro and M1 Max.

Apple says this allows AI researchers and developers to train custom models on their devices, and creative users can benefit from faster 3D rendering, video editing, and music production.

The MacBook Pro also features up to 2x faster read/write performance than last generation, and will start with 1TB of storage for the MacBook Pro with M5 Pro, and 2TB for the MacBook Pro with M5 Max. Apple says these laptops 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. The laptops support Thunderbolt 5 and have a six-speaker audio system.

Prices for the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with the M5 Pro chipset start at $2,199 and $2,699, respectively, while the models with the M5 Max chipset start at $3,599 and $3,899, and are 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.