Apple's new MacBooks: The pinnacle of the generation
Apple announced new MacBook Airs and Pros today, and they’re both boring and mostly excellent.
MacBook Air
This looks like a very basic spec bump, which I’m not mad about. I would like to see this display get an upgrade one day, and I'd love for them to split the USB-C ports to the left and right to add some charging flexibility, but I don't think this design is long enough in the tooth to draw my ire (2027 and 2028 Matt will start to get a little antsy, though).
We were wondering what the storage and RAM crunch would mean for the Mac lineup, and thankfully, it seems Apple is handling this well. The starting RAM has remained at 16GB and the starting storage has bumped up to 512GB from 256GB in the M4 model, but that also does come with a $100 starting price increase, up to $1,099. That's technically $100 less than upgrading to 512GB storage version in the previous generation, but yeah, a $100 higher starting price is still a bit of a bummer.
MacBook Pro
The new M5 Pro and Max chips look like killers. As an avowed defender of the Pro line of chips, Apple's suggestions of multiple times faster LLM performance and 40-60% performance jumps over the M4 Pro is really exciting for a single generation upgrade from what was already the best mobile computer chips in the game (the Max chips have similar jumps).
What's most impressive to me about this update is that the prices seem to have stayed completely level from last year. I have a 14" M4 Pro model that I bought a year ago. It had the better Pro chip and 1TB of storage, and cost me $2,399 before trade in. Getting that same model (upgraded Pro chip, 1TB storage, 24GB RAM) in the M5 generation would run me the same $2,399. I'm not at all tempted to upgrade myself, as I'm more than happy with the M4 Pro and even with a trade-in I'd be about $1,200 out of pocket, but in a world where everything is getting more expensive and we're in the middle of a supply chain mess, it's good to see Pro Macs holding the line on price.
As for the design, I'm still fine with it, but it seems like this will be the last generation of MacBook Pros with this design. Strong rumors swirl of a decent change coming in the M6 generation with a dynamic island and touch input, so we'll see how that turns out. For now, this is just an incredibly fucking fast version of the great product redesign Apple gave the MacBook Pro back in 2021.
