Early last month, Apple lifted the veil off of a new batch of MacBook Pro laptops. Unlike the one launched last year that’s armed with the M5 chip, these newer ones are armed with the M5 Pro and M5 Max instead. Over a month later, they can finally be found on local store shelves.
As a refresher, these new MacBook Pros are not much different compared to the base model from last year. That said, these newer ones do get an additional 16-inch option to choose from. Otherwise, it’s the familiar Liquid Retina XDR display, with up to 1,600 nits peak brightness when displaying HDR content. There’s also an optional nano-texture layer on top to reduce glare.
Naturally, the highlight of these newer MacBook Pro models are the newer chips, the M5 Pro and M5 Max. These are built using the Fusion Architecture that combines two dies into a single chipset. On core count, they go up to 18 cores, and breaking them down, you get 12 performance cores with six “super cores”.
New here is the N1 chip, with gives these laptops support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Then there’s memory support at much higher capacities. The M5 Pro, for instance, supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s memory bandwidth, while the M5 Max goes up to 128GB with up to 614GB/s bandwidth.
Other pieces of the spec sheet includes a 12MP Centre Stage Camera with Desk View support, a six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio support, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, up to 8K output via HDMI, an SDXC card slot, and MagSafe 3 with fast charging.
As for what they cost, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro starts from RM8,999, or RM8,399 for education. The 16-inch variant starts from RM10,999 or RM10,199 respectively. For models with the M5 Max, the 14-inch laptop starts from RM14,999, or RM13,699 for education. Upsize this to 16 inches, and the starting prices are RM15,999 and RM14,799 respectively.
