MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 is out: 1.6x faster GPU, 3.5x AI perf, but is the $1599 price tempting?

Apple has stuck with the entry-level price of $1,599, but with not much to shout about outside of M5 performance boosts - will this be enough to entice upgraders?

MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 is out: 1.6x faster GPU, 3.5x AI perf, but is the $1599 price tempting?
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TL;DR: Apple has launched a new MacBook Pro 14-inch featuring the M5 chip, delivering up to 3.5x faster AI performance, 1.6x improved graphics, and up to 24 hours of battery life. It also supports a 4TB SSD, and starts at $1599 with pre-orders available now.

Apple has revealed its new MacBook Pro 14‑inch laptop which has the M5 chip under the hood.

Apple has stuck with the same pricing for its new MacBook Pro 14?inch M5 (Image Credit: Apple)
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Apple has stuck with the same pricing for its new MacBook Pro 14‑inch M5 (Image Credit: Apple)

The rumor mill was insistent that this would happen this week, and now we've witnessed the arrival of this next-gen MacBook, or the first of these machines which is the baseline offering.

Revealing the new laptop via a simple press release - yes, this is a relatively lowkey refresh - Apple boasted about improved performance (naturally), particularly when it comes to accelerating AI workloads (no surprises there, either).

According to Apple:

"The M5 chip features a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering up to 3.5x the AI performance and up to 1.6x faster graphics than the previous generation."

That's based on Apple's own testing, of course, so we need to add a little seasoning in terms of cherry-picking and the like. In the case of the graphics benchmark, this is running pro applications, where the MacBook Pro M5 with a 10-core GPU was pitted against the MacBook Pro 14‑inch M4 with a 10-core GPU (and 10-core CPU plus 32GB of RAM).

Apple also promises up to 1.6x faster frame rates in games, and the M5 model is up to 3.2x faster than an older MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 for gaming. The press release further observes that the laptop has a battery life of up to 24 hours (four more hours than the M1 model).

Other talking points include the ability to configure up to 4TB of solid-state storage, and a slight increase in memory bandwidth to 150GB/s. There's also a faster 16-core Neural Engine, Apple tells us, while again underlining AI performance and running local LLMs much faster.

Just as rumored, most of the work is around the M5 chip and how that boosts performance. There's no Wi-Fi 7 here, in case you were wondering, and Apple has stuck with Wi-Fi 6E when a fair few people were hoping for a wireless upgrade here (especially as that has happened with other Apple hardware, including the new iPad Pro M5 which has the latest Wi-Fi standard).

The new MacBook Pro 14‑inch M5 starts from $1,599 in the US, maintaining existing pricing, and is live for pre-order now, with shipping starting on Wednesday, October 22. The laptop can be had in space black or silver colors.

Initial reaction to the price has been guarded, and it's not clear if Apple has quite done enough to please or tempt the crowds of would-be upgraders from MacBook Pro M1 models with its pricing. While the M4 refresh last time around also stuck to the same price, that came with an upgrade to 16GB of RAM for the base model, which obviously isn't the case here.

As mentioned, Apple also revealed a new iPad Pro M5, and with this device the company again underlined AI performance levels, and how it's 3.5x faster than the previous iPad Pro with M4 SoC.