Apple debuts beefed-up MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro, M5 Max chips
Tuesday, March 3, 2026 at 10:21AM 
Source: Apple
Apple expanded its laptop lineup with the debut of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro powered by the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Externally, they look similar to their predecessors, while the internals received a massive overhaul centred on a new "Fusion Architecture." These chips feature an 18-core CPU with "super cores" that Apple claims are the fastest in the world, delivering a 30% boost in overall performance. Additionally, base storage has been doubled, with M5 Pro models now starting at 1TB and M5 Max models at 2TB.
One of its significant leaps arrives in the form of artificial intelligence processing and specialized hardware. Each GPU core now includes a Neural Accelerator, enabling M5 Pro and M5 Max to process LLM prompts up to four times faster than the previous generation. Professionals will also see a 50% increase in graphics performance and SSD speeds that are twice as fast as before, reaching up to 14.5GB/s.
