M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro lineup arrives with promising performance improvements and twice the base storage

Apple's high-end 14" and 16" MacBook Pro lineup was notably absent when the company unleashed the vanilla M5-powered MacBook Pro (currently $1,449 on Amazon) in the fall of last year. Thankfully, the M5 Pro and M5 Max-powered MacBook Pro family has finally arrived, boasting upgraded SoCs and an identical design.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs appear to be extremely potent, at least on paper. Both chips pack up to an 18-core setup with six "Super" cores and twelve "Performance" cores. Clearly, the "efficiency core" branding has been dropped. According to Apple, the overall improvement in performance should be as high as 30%.

As for the GPU, Apple has decided to stick with up to a 20-core GPU for the M5 Pro, and a 40-core GPU for the M5 Max. Performance gains reported by Apple are promising, with up to a 35% jump in workloads with ray tracing components. Raw GPU performance should be around 20% higher. Thanks to the neural accelerators in each core, LLMs should be 3.9x to 4x fasterr.

Storage is a lot faster than before, according to Apple, with read speeds reaching 14.5 GB/s. Base storage has also been doubled - the M5 Pro starts at 1 TB, and the M5 Max variants start with 2 TB. Thanks to skyrocketing prices for NAND flash, the starting prices for the MacBook Pros have also been increased, which we'll get to later.

Thanks to the addition of Apple's N1 chip, wireless networking capabilities have been improved, finally bringing WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to the high-end MacBook Pro family. 

The rest of the MacBook Pro has been left mostly untouched. The 14" and 16" Liquid Retina XDR displays continue to boast exactly the same resolution and features as before, and the same applies to the I/O selection.

As for pricing, the M5 Pro-powered MacBook Pro 14" start at $2,199  for the variant with a cut-down M5 Pro SoC (15-core CPU, 16-core GPU), 24 GB RAM, and 1 TB storage. The MacBook Pro 16" with the full M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM, and 1 TB storage starts at $2,699. As usual, the nano-texture add-on for the display will command an additional $150.

The M5 Max variant of the MacBook Pro 14" with an 18-core CPU and 32-core GPU, 2 TB storage, and 36 GB RAM starts at $3,899, while the 16" with the same configuration starts at $3,899. For the un-binned M5 Max SKU with 48 GB RAM and 2 TB storage, customers will have to shell out $4,099 and $4,399 for the 14" and 16" variants respectively.