Apple upgrading some customers to M5 for free

Apple just announced the M5 lineup of MacBooks without making a big deal out of the launch. There was no livestream event, just newsletters and a few short clips on the YouTube channel. While most people are usually aware of latest Apple product launches, there are a few that end up ordering a last gen device just before the new lineup becomes available. Apparently, Apple is giving free upgrades to these customers.

As reported on Reddit by multiple users (1,2,3), after placing orders for M4 series MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, the orders stayed in processing for a while before eventually being cancelled. Then, these orders were replaced with an M5 series processor, and the same configurations. No extra price was charged on these orders. They are still in the pre-order phase with shipping to start soon.

As pointed out by a few commenters, Apple tends to do this for customers in this situation as they want to avoid returns. Shipping the product itself and then covering the return as well can get expensive. Whether the customer has other Apple devices or not, the upgrade is usually automatic.

Apple claims up to 20% performance gains for the M5 compared to the M4. The GPU performance is said to be 30% faster while AI-based tasks see a 4x improvement. Similar story with the M5 Pro and M5 Max as they claim an overall 30% improvement in performance. Ray tracing workloads are said to get up to a 35% boost. Raw GPU performance should be around 20% higher.