Apple (AAPL) continued its March product rollout on Tuesday, unveiling its latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as more powerful M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.
Apple’s volume offering, the MacBook Air, now starts at $1,099, up $100 from last year’s model, and comes with the company’s M5 processor and more storage, up from 256GB to 512GB.
In addition to the Air, Apple also announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max processors. The chips use what Apple calls Fusion Architecture, which combines two chips into a single processor, the company said. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max are available with 18-core CPUs, including 6 “super cores” and 12 new “performance cores.”
Both processors are available in Apple’s new MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch. Apple is focusing on artificial intelligence capabilities in laptops, saying that the MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip can process LLM prompts 6.9 times faster than the M1 Pro, while the MacBook Pro with the M5 Max can generate AI images 8 times faster than the MacBook Pro with the M1 Max.
Like the Air, Apple increased the base storage space of the MacBook Pro from 512GB in the M4 Pro to 1TB in the M5 Pro. The M5 Max model now has 2TB, while the M4 Max has 1TB.
The advantages come at a cost, though. The base 14-inch MacBook Pro with the standard M5 chip starts at $1,699, up from $1,599 last year.
Jump to the M5 Pro and you’ll pay $2,199. Meanwhile, the M5 Max version starts at $3,599.
Opt for the 16-inch MacBook Pro with all the features, and you’ll end up paying $7,349.
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