Apple said on the 4th it is rolling out its in-house M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and launching new MacBook Pro models (14- and 16-inch) equipped with them.
The new chips build on the M5 unveiled in Oct. last year, expanding parallel processing for heavy workloads. Unlike the M5's 10-core CPU (four performance cores and six efficiency cores), the M5 Pro and Max are designed with 18 cores by adding six super cores and 12 performance cores.
The graphics processing unit (GPU) increases to 20 cores for the M5 Pro and 40 cores for the M5 Max, strengthening On-device AI performance. Apple said the new MacBook Pro's AI instruction processing speed is up to four times faster than the M4 Pro and Max and eight times faster than the M1 models.
SSD read and write speeds are twice as fast, and the battery lasts up to 24 hours. Apple also unveiled MacBook Air models (13- and 15-inch) with the base M5 chip, saying AI task speeds are four times faster than the previous models.
Apple said the push to raise built-in AI performance across the Mac lineup is meant to strengthen the foundation for expanding the scope of its own AI features, including "Apple Intelligence," going forward.
Prices rose by $100 to $400 compared with the previous models, and Korea launch prices climbed by 200,000 won to 1.1 million won. That contrasts with its decision the day before to freeze prices for the iPhone 17e and iPads with the M4 chip.
Instead, base storage was increased from 256GB to 512GB for MacBook Air and from 512GB to 1TB for MacBook Pro. A 27-inch 5K Retina-based Studio Display and "Studio Display XDR" were also unveiled. The XDR model uses a mini LED backlight to support 2,000 nits of brightness and a 120Hz variable refresh rate. Prices are 2,499,000 won for the Studio Display and 5,199,000 won for the XDR. Preorders start on the 4th, with the official launch on the 11th.