The M5 silicon, a new 14-inch MacBook Pro, and a perceived AI leap

The first MacBook to get the M5 silicon refresh, alongside the newest generation of the 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro, is the 14-inch MacBook Pro. This year, the new Apple Silicon generation arrives on the MacBook Pro, one product for now, to complete the M5 chip portfolio across the portable product lines and use cases for customers. Pricing of the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5, which starts at ₹1,69,999 isn’t entirely dissimilar from last year’s 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 silicon.

This year, the new Apple Silicon generation arrives on the MacBook Pro. (Official image)

“MacBook Pro continues to be the world’s best pro laptop, and today, the 14-inch MacBook Pro gets even better with the arrival of the M5 chip,” says John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “M5 marks the next big leap in AI for the Mac and delivers a huge boost in graphics performance, accelerating demanding workflows for everyone from students to creatives, developers to business professionals, and more. With its amazing performance, extraordinary battery life, and unrivalled display, M5 takes the new 14-inch MacBook Pro to another level.”

The headline changes arrive at the silicon level, and understandably so. The upgrades that underline the M5 chip include an upgraded GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, which means this is 3.5x faster with AI compute than the M4, and the graphics performance is up to 1.6x faster as well than the previous generation silicon (this means faster frame rates when gaming; this illustrates Apple’s insistent push towards gaming robustness). Apple says the faster 16-core Neural Engine further accelerates on-device, AI-driven tasks and enhances performance of the generative models that power Apple Intelligence. Alongside is the solid-state drive (SSD) storage that is twice as fast as before, which should speed up everything from app load times to multitasking switching.

Something that would worry chip rivals Intel — Apple says that when compared to Intel-based systems, the M5 on the 14-inch MacBook Pro delivers up to 86x faster AI performance, up to 30x faster GPU performance with ray tracing, and up to 5.5x faster CPU performance. Within the Apple Silicon family, the tech giant compares how far things have come since the first effort, the M1, the AI performance is up to 6x faster, as well as up to 6.8x faster GPU performance with ray tracing, and twice as quick when it comes to core CPU performance.

Alongside this significant step forward for performance, is a further refinement of Apple’s pursuit for maximum performance per watt — signified by the 24 hour battery life. In our tests of the M4 powered MacBook Pro, the battery life aspect was already quite a performance luxury, lasting between 14 hours and 24 hours on a single charge, the latter if you were really careful with apps and multitasking. Last year, the 14-inch MacBook Pro had added another USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 port, as well as the option for an anti-glare coating for the Liquid Retina XDR display, and those continue with this generation as well. For now, the colour choices are space black and silver.