MacBook Pro 2026
Apple (Hacker News, TidBITS, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):
Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop.
[…]
The new MacBook Pro includes N1, an Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, bringing improved performance and reliability to wireless connections. It also offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display with a nano-texture option; a wide array of connectivity[…]
[…]
The new MacBook Pro delivers up to 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation, reaching speeds of up to 14.5GB/s and accelerating workflows for professionals working across 4K and 8K video projects, LLMs, and complex datasets. MacBook Pro with M5 Pro now comes standard with 1TB of storage, while MacBook Pro with M5 Max now comes standard with 2TB. And the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 now comes standard with 1TB of storage.
Seems like a great incremental update.
The starting price of the M5 MacBook Pro was $1,599, but now it starts at $1,699 because of the updated storage. While the starting price has gone up, the price for SSD upgrades has technically shifted down.
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Upgrading to 2TB from the base starting storage used to be $600, but now the 2TB upgrade is $400. The 4TB upgrade is $1,000, $200 less than the $1,200 that it used to cost.
The MacBook Pro Tech Specs page is a good place to start to compare the entire M5 MacBook Pro lineup.
I wish Apple would have permalinks for these pages so that I could link to content that wouldn’t be different next year.
Also worth noting — Apple’s RAM pricing remains unchanged, despite the spike in memory prices industry-wide.
It’s the least they could do given the huge margins in the past.
Last year you needed buy one with the high-end M4 Max chip to get 64 GB; now you can configure a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro with 64 GB.
Previously:
Update (2026-03-04): Mr. Macintosh:
Looks like Apple updated the keyboard on the new M5 16‑inch MacBook Pro. The Backspace, Return, Shift, and Tab labels are gone, replaced with symbols instead.
I think the M5 Macs are likely the last ones built on procurement agreements pre-memory-and-storage-shortage. I predict that shortage will not end in the next few years and will affect all parts of the consumer computer economy because I predict that the marginal return on silicon in data centers will increase exponentially with the scaling of AI. I predict this will dramatically drive up the cost of products for consumers or dramatically drive down their supply.
Update (2026-03-20): Jason Snell:
To summarize, the M5 CPU core is about 15% faster than the M4 generation, and the Pro and Max 15- or 18-core CPU configurations are going to blow my 14-core M4 Max out of the water. My review unit is 23% faster than my M4 Max laptop.
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In the end, the question for upgraders coming from older Apple silicon MacBook Pros will be: Is it worth it to get a more powerful chip to do whatever it is you’re doing? And, secondarily: Are you willing to wait to see what Apple might have up its sleeve with the first iteration of an entirely new design, if that’s indeed what’s coming?
In our testing, the fully enabled M5 Max’s single-core performance is about 10 percent higher than the fully enabled version of the M4 Max in last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. The multi-core performance improvements are more variable (Cinebench R23, which shows a 30 percent improvement, seems to be an outlier), but most tests also show a modest 10 or 12 percent improvement.
Graphics performance improvements are slightly more robust, measuring between 20 and 35 percent depending on the test. Apple suggests you may see more uplift on GPU compute workloads that can leverage the neural accelerator Apple has built into each M5-family GPU core.
The first reviews of the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max chips were published today by selected publications and YouTube channels, ahead of the laptops launching on Wednesday.
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On the Pro/Max side, Apple effectively gave everyone a compulsory storage upgrade. All the models are $200 more expensive, however they start with double the storage of before: 1 TB for the M5 Pro, 2 TB for the M5 Max. Adjusted for storage, these all cost exactly the same as their M4 Pro/Max counterparts.
I'm *very* wary of the "super/performance" core fuckery, though. I'll wait until someone benchmarks these new "P"-cores to see how they compare to previous P- and E-cores, as a ~40% reduction in high-perf cores is very substantial. It should help the 14” machines perform better, though, as the M2 Max could occasionally throttle if you didn't run custom fan speeds, and AIUI the M3 Max and M4 Pro/Max all would throttle pretty badly with enough CPU+GPU sustained pressure.
The Register has a good take on the new higher RAM/SSD: "Apple's storage and memory prices are notoriously high, and despite skyrocketing memory prices, Apple probably isn't paying an extra $200 to add another 512 GB of storage to the board. As we recently reported, NAND flash prices are hovering at around $0.2 per gigabyte. Instead, Apple appears to be trying to offset higher DRAM costs while making customers feel like they're still getting a good deal." (https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/apples_m5_pro_max_macbooks/)
So in other words, by offering more RAM/SSD in the base models at higher starting prices, the average retail price per GB/TB will go up enough to offset the higher cost for Apple.
I really want to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware... been considering trading in both my MacBook Pro and Studio toward one beast of a laptop just to have one Mac, but honestly Liquid Glass has me wondering if I want to stick with the macOS ecosystem at all.
Apple's hardware is amazing! But their software is regressing. If Microsoft Office and Fusion360/some other good CAD software was available on Linux, I'd probably have already switched.
The symbolics on the keyboard help with menu shortcut identification. Though Beancounter Tim probably approved it to save $0.00001 per unit on spare parts and localization costs.
I also notice "Fn" on the Function key shifts downward.
The symbolics on the keyboard were always there for other keyboard locales, its the US keyboard that had the keys with written description ('delete' etc. instead). Not sure if this has changed or if Mr. Macintosh just got confused by a photo showing a different keyboard locale.
Has apple trade-in always been bad? I bought a 15” MacBook Air in December; specced up to 2TB, 32gb RAM, costing to £2,299. Today, three months later, I did the thing we all do and specced up a new one, and the trade-in price they offer is £475 for a fully working model (where they know the exact model and spec cos they have the serial number)
I’ve never traded in a new-ish device before; even though the spec itself was released a year ago, is it normal for Apple/vendors to offer such a stingy price?
Of course I’m not actually gonna upgrade - the 2025 Air is an amazing machine and runs my processor-heavy music production software faster and better than my top-flight, £3,500 MacBook Pro from 2020 ever did.
