Apple is not yet ready to release its high-end MacBooks. But as a reward for making it through the terrible year 2025, engineers at Apple’s Cupertino, California, campus have a new MacBook Pro with M5 to help you out. Better yet, Apple claims that this new 14-inch MacBook Pro offers better battery life than before.
The new MacBook Pro looks a lot like last year’s MacBook Pro with M4. It still uses the same Liquid Retina XDR mini LED display as previous iterations. Of course, that means there’s still the notch hanging above the screen, like a guillotine blade on the verge of a terrible descent, not to mention the same Magic Keyboard design that has become standard on all Mac products. If you were hoping to finally get the OLED boon on Mac, you’ll probably have to wait until next year at the earliest.
Apple says the new M5 chip is specifically designed for AI and graphics performance. The new version of the M-series silicon includes new GPU cores, and each has a neural accelerator. This is claimed to deliver 3.5x better AI performance than the previous generation, but let’s be honest, you really care about how it will perform on graphics-intensive tasks. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5’s 10-core GPU promises 1.6x faster graphics performance in some creative applications compared to the M4 chip. It should offer better multithreaded performance for longer workloads, which can benefit code compilation or video editing.
This will be the first MacBook to ship with macOS 26 Tahoe, which means you’ll need to get used to Liquid Glass and Spotlight feature changes sooner rather than later. The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,600 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. You’ll have to spend $1,800 for a version with 1TB of storage and $2,000 for a model with 24GB of RAM. The device is now up for pre-order and units are expected to start shipping on October 22, according to Apple. The MacBook comes in the usual Space Black and Silver colors.
Reliable leaks have suggested that a new MacBook Pro, powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, could arrive next year, potentially with an improved chip design. Intel recently launched its Panther Lake mobile chips with a unique design that increases the size of the GPU, or graphics processing unit. Panther Lake uses a die-to-die bridge to connect its GPU and CPU, meaning the former can be larger than it could be if both were housed on the same chip. Perhaps Apple takes a similar approach with its next chips. An improved GPU would make sense, given that the company is pushing gaming on the Mac much more than in previous years.
Whatever pleasures await Mac fans in 2026, at least Apple means that’s not the case. will raise prices on its lower-end models, even though it finds itself in the eye of President Donald Trump’s tariff storm. Next year, however, could bring even more challenges to big tech’s supply chains. We’ll have to see if the company’s current pricing system can survive.
