The new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro have upgraded storage, M5 chips, and much more

Apple has finally revealed new models of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is getting double the base storage and an upgrade to the M5 chip, while the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro now has M5 Pro and M5 Max options.

The new devices come after yesterday's reveal of the iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air , as part of Apple's week of announcements. We're expecting a budget MacBook to be revealed tomorrow , possibly called the 'MacBook Neo,' but Apple is only talking about the Air and Pro today, alongside new Studio Display monitors .

First up is the new MacBook Air. The design isn't changing from the previous M4-powered model, but some updates are coming to the internal hardware. It now has the latest M5 chipset, which debuted back in October on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. That means faster performance and better power efficiency—Apple pointed out 28% faster unified memory, 1.5x faster 3D rendering in Blender, and 1.5x faster image processing in Affinity, compared to the M4 MacBook Air.

The other important change here is that 512 GB is now the base storage capacity, twice as much as the M4 MacBook Air. If you've ever used a modern Mac, you'll know that it's not difficult to fill up 256 GB, especially if you install many applications. Now, you don't have to pay more to solve that particular problem. The SSD is also up to twice as fast in read and write performance, compared to the drive in the previous Air.

Most of the other hardware remains identical to the previous generation. It still has a 13-inch or 15-inch display, 12MP Center Stage webcam, up to 18 hours of battery life, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to two external displays. However, Apple did switch to its own N1 wireless chip this time around, which means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support.

Next, the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pronow have options with M5 Pro and M5 Max chipsets, making them Apple's most powerful laptops to date. Those chips have "up to a 50 percent increase in graphics performance compared to M4 Pro and M4 Max," with higher unified memory bandwidth and a more power-efficient Neural Engine. Apple said the M5 Pro delivers up to 3.9x faster LLM prompt processing, 1.4x faster 3D rendering in Maxon Redshift, and 1.6x faster gaming performance with ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077, compared to the previous M4 Pro. Both laptops also now have an Apple N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Apple has also upgraded the SSD storage. The M5 Pro has a 1 TB base storage capacity, while the M5 Max version has 2 TB as standard—twice as much as the previous generations. The drives' read and write speeds are also now "up to 2x faster," reaching a maximum speed of 14.5 GB/s. Apple also bumped up the regular 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro to 1 TB of storage.

The new MacBook Air starts at $1,099, a $100 increase from the previous model. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro starts at $2,199, and the 16-inch version starts at $2,699. The M5 Max equivalents start at $3,599 and $3,899, respectively. You'll be able to pre-order the laptops from Apple starting Wednesday, March 11.

Source: Apple ( MacBook Air , MacBook Pro )