Apple isn’t quite ready to release its top-end MacBooks yet. But as a pity prize for getting through the awful year of 2025, the engineers on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, have a new MacBook Pro with M5 to tide you over. Better yet, Apple claims this new 14-inch MacBook Pro offers better battery life than before.
The new MacBook Pro looks very, very similar to last year’s MacBook Pro with M4. It’s still using the same Liquid Retina XDR mini LED display as previous iterations did. Of course, that means it still has the notch hanging over the screen, like a guillotine blade on the edge of a terrible descent, not to mention the same Magic Keyboard design that’s become standard across Mac products. If you were hoping we would finally receive the windfall of OLED on Mac, you’ll probably have to wait until next year at the earliest.
Apple claims the new M5 chip is built specifically for AI and graphics performance. The new version of the M-series silicon includes new GPU cores, and each is packed with a neural accelerator. This is supposed to offer 3.5 times 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 M5’s 10-core GPU promises 1.6 times faster graphics performance in some creative apps compared to the M4 chip. It should have better multi-thread performance for longer workloads, which may benefit code compiling or video editing.
This will be the first MacBook to ship with macOS 26 Tahoe, which means you’ll have to get used to Liquid Glass and changes to the Spotlight function sooner rather than later. The new MacBook Pro starts at $1,600 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. You’ll need to spend $1,800 for a version with 1TB of storage and a whopping $2,000 for a model with 24GB of RAM. The device is up for preorder now, and units should start shipping Oct. 22, according to Apple. The MacBook is available in the usual Space Black and Silver colors.
Reliable leakers have suggested that a new MacBook Pro, powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, could come next year, potentially with an upgraded chip design. Intel recently debuted its Panther Lake mobile chips with a unique design that expands 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 the two were housed on the same die. Perhaps Apple is taking a similar approach with its upcoming chips. An upgraded GPU would make sense, considering that the company is pushing gaming on Mac far more than it has in previous years.
Whatever delights may be in store for Mac fans in 2026, at least Apple is signifying that it’s not going to raise the prices of its lower-end models, even as it sits in the eye of President Donald Trump’s tariff storm. Next year, however, could bring even more hardship to big tech’s supply chains. We’ll have to see if the company’s current pricing scheme can survive.