Incremental but still exceptional, with a big AI leap

The M5 chip brings real gains for those building or running AI models. For everyone else, the changes feel theoretical

- Shouvik Das [e-mail]

Earlier this year, Apple marked the second consecutive year of launching a laptop with absolutely no identifiers of changes on the exterior. After a redesign in 2023, Apple’s MacBook Pro lineup is deemed to be fresh enough in design, and functional enough in practicality—prompting the company to make no changes to what is not broken. This year, the M5 chip’s advent made for even fewer changes—but for its target audience, this can be a crucial upgrade.

On paper, the M5 chip is clearly the better one. While its single-core performance is comparable with the M4 chip, the M5-powered MacBook Pro critically does well at improving its graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, as well as what the company calls ‘neural accelerators’ integrated into its GPU cores. Adding to all of this, the M5 processor now supports higher memory bandwidth of 153 gigabits per second.