Signs point to a sooner-rather-than-later M5 MacBook Pro refresh

Delayed shipping times for current models sometimes means an update is imminent.

See full article...

 

[SraCet]

...
Well some devs obviously do need it, but I take your point that most do not. I do think there's something to be said for having a generally friendly attitude towards developers, and as Apple's attitude in the minds of many developers has suffered in recent years, I contend they would benefit from a more developer-friendly attitude, which includes consistently standing behind your developer products.

Do you think the Mac Pro is a "developer product"?

It isn't.

 

[SraCet]

I keep seeing people repeat this, but I've rarely found it true. First of all, you can't compare RAM directly any longer. On PCs DRAM is still hampered by either being socketed, which introduces bandwidth limits due to how electrical signals behave across non-soldered connections versus directly soldered ones.

Not really. The bandwidth limitation is how many chips or sticks of RAM are connected to the CPU in parallel. For most consumer CPUs, there are two channels, i.e., two independent paths to different sticks of RAM (or sets of sticks). But there's nothing preventing them from having more and having the aggregate bandwidth be the same as the chips that are connected to an Apple Silicon die. Server CPUs do this.

...
IIRC the RAM on the newer M CPUs are unified. They're literally on the CPU package. FAIK no PC does that.

Recent chips from Intel and AMD does this, e.g., AMD Max AI+ chips or whatever they're called. Intel makes some too. I'm sure you can look it up for yourself but if you want me to, I can do that for you.

Disclaimer, this post shouldn't be considered anti-Mac or pro-PC. Just posting about some facts.

 

[senjaz]

I don't understand why they don't commit to updating the Mac Pro more regularly. Even if it's not a moneymaker, I would think making the effort to update it on a regular cadence (every two years?) would be a reassuring signal to Apple devs.

The biggest problem is lacking a clear purpose. Big box macs were always aimed at users that needed expansion and upgrade options. With Apple’s move to SOCs it severely limits what can be done. Even though the trash can Mac was derided, it was the future of professional Macs. There wasn’t a reason to refresh them, as almost everyone has moved to using Mac studios. A new niche has presented itself though. A new rack mountable Mac Pro with the option to fit extra SOCs inside in a mesh would be very desirable for those wanting to run local LLMs. Were it not for this I think big box macs would have been left to die.

 

[Ed1024]

Absolutely true for anyone doing basic photo editing, as I know being another M1 MacBook Pro user who doesn't feel particularly compelled to upgrade after this long. (All my previous laptops felt old after this many years, but not the M1.)

The one thing that changes things a little is AI features in photo applications. I am not talking about fake images, but useful things like noise reduction and subject/object detection for masks. Although my M1 does that OK, if I needed to get more bulk jobs out in less time and wanted to use AI features, I would want to upgrade to something with a lot more GPU cores. The GPU was not as important for photo work before AI existed, but for AI performance with locally run models, nothing else in the system helps like more GPU cores. (OK, the Neural Engine sometimes, but even today it is not widely used.)

I would say the same. I really notice the speedup of ML-enhanced applications like Pixelmator when processing photos while trying to keep the quality at maximum. You can use large canvasses and complicated filters without having your workflow interrupted by significant pauses.

All the M-series are champs but the later ones are more performant on photo/video/audio (or anything that needs memory bandwidth and/or lights up the custom encoders/decoders/engines) than the basic specs might suggest when comparing generation to generation.

 

[puelocesar]

I'm still mad they didn't update it last year. I bought a "temporary Air" because of my job, and was going to replace it as soon as the new Pro launched. Big mistake, they didn't launch it, and now I have to wait 10 minutes for a build to compile..

Hopefully they will finally do it later this month

 

[CommanderJameson]

Do you think the Mac Pro is a "developer product"?

It isn't.

It’s hard to see how Apple could be less interested in the Mac Pro, short of them just straight-up cancelling it.

 

[Jonas-fr]

Funny enough, Apple may eventually bring back the Xserve, though rebranded as something else. They ARE making higher end chips for internal use.

Source?

 

[decisiontable]

Your milage may vary, but in my opinion, unless you are doing something truly pushing the bleeding edge tech-wise, I'm not sure all these M3 vs M4 vs M5 conversations matter much in the real world and are more for number-flexing on a spec sheet.

I do dev work with some high end photography on the side and went from an M1 air to an M3 15-inch air to currently rocking an M4-Pro MBP and to be honest...I am not sure I could really tell a difference between the three in real-world usage for me. They all boot up and run Visual Studio/VSCode, run Pixlemator Pro/Photoshop and all the other "normal day" software for me without any issues.

Don't let spec-sheet fomo bring you down; the Apple Silicon chips are so powerful and efficient even M1s are still perfectly viable in most use cases.

I recently went from an M1 8gb Air to an M5 16gb Pro. I don't really notice any performance difference doing software development or anything else. The screen and in particular the speakers are huge improvements, though.

Benchmarking the systems using one of my Python projects, runtime for the big test suite went from 11 seconds on M1 to 6 seconds on M5. About 50% in four generations. Nothing to sneeze at, but also sort of "meh".

 

[CommanderJameson]

I recently went from an M1 8gb Air to an M5 16gb Pro. I don't really notice any performance difference doing software development or anything else. The screen and in particular the speakers are huge improvements, though.

Benchmarking the systems using one of my Python projects, runtime for the big test suite went from 11 seconds on M1 to 6 seconds on M5. About 50% in four generations. Nothing to sneeze at, but also sort of "meh".

At this point in the product lineup, the differences between the Air and the Pro are creature comforts, like a better screen, better speakers, and more ports.

 

[Tjerker]

As a video editor, I own a Mac Studio M1 Max and a MacBook Pro M4 Max. While video editing, the difference between the two isn’t significant. However, exporting files is faster, which is a welcome improvement.

As an (hobbyist) astrophotographer, I run AstroPixelProcessor, PixInsight, etc. - that's when I get both machines to turn their fans on. It's about stacking hundreds of images - a very intensive process.

 

[dmsilev]

At this point in the product lineup, the differences between the Air and the Pro are creature comforts, like a better screen, better speakers, and more ports.

Except for the baseline MBP, you also get more CPU/GPU cores. Whether or not that matters to you depends hugely on what you're doing with the machine. I've certainly run calculations on my M1 Pro machine that railed all of the performance cores for minutes or hours at a time (Monte Carlo sims, hybrid CPU and GPU load). Doing that on an Air would have taken much longer; half as many cores and no fan so it throttles back due to thermal limits after a short period.

 

[JohnCarter17]

I don't understand why they don't commit to updating the Mac Pro more regularly. Even if it's not a moneymaker, I would think making the effort to update it on a regular cadence (every two years?) would be a reassuring signal to Apple devs.

There are not a ton of devs who need an update to the Mac Pro, but they are vocal. Between Studio Max or Ultra, the majority have all the horsepower and memory they need. Its the ones needing multiple expansion slots for cards. Those needs can be addressed to some extent with external PCIE enclosures.

 

[henriquegemignani]

Benchmarking the systems using one of my Python projects, runtime for the big test suite went from 11 seconds on M1 to 6 seconds on M5. About 50% in four generations. Nothing to sneeze at, but also sort of "meh".

So the application runs about twice as fast. In an era where Cpu upgrades are quite weak and usually consumes more power. It's quite an incredible difference imo

 

[JohnCarter17]

Don't forget fast internal PCIe storage and high speed networking.
Yeah, yeah, most people don't need this. (Most people don't need McLarens, either.)
I DO.

Fast internal PCIe storage isn't needed with AS using TB 4/5 ports. External SSDs are operating at the speed of the PCIe bus.

 

[JohnCarter17]

Before Christmas I picked up a MacBook Air M4 for $750 to replace my aging MBP 13" OG M1... it's a perfect travel laptop. And at home, it's docked to a thunderbolt 4 dock - can't even tell it's not a full blown Pro or desktop. Apple has done some wizardry with their chips + OS optimization.

Yes, the liquid ass is a stubbed toe of a release, but when I get two days of solid use out of a laptop without being plugged in or dead-dog slow... that's a win.

M5 will be an incremental uptick that I only thank for making the current gen cheaper for me.

Yeah, the Trekkie in me wanted an M5 (The Ultimate Computer) MB, but I already jumped (in October) from Windows to MacOS with a refurb M4 Studio Max (14/32, 36, 512) and I can wait on the laptop. I have kept it on Sequoia.

Heaviest usage is Handbrake and its ridiculous compared to my old i7-5820K.

 

[JohnCarter17]

nevermind, misread.

 

[decisiontable]

So the application runs about twice as fast. In an era where Cpu upgrades are quite weak and usually consumes more power. It's quite an incredible difference imo

Yeah, I'm happy to have it. But that is 50% not from one generation to next, but from FOUR generations plus a move up from budget-tier to premium-tier laptop.

Edit: come to think of it, I probably paid more than twice for me the M5 than I did for the M1, so performance per dollar is slightly worse. Though the other air-›pro improvements more than makes up for it.

 

[NetMage]

I'm still mad they didn't update it last year. I bought a "temporary Air" because of my job, and was going to replace it as soon as the new Pro launched. Big mistake, they didn't launch it, and now I have to wait 10 minutes for a build to compile..

Why don’t you get a Studio?

 

[jacs]

Fast internal PCIe storage isn't needed with AS using TB 4/5 ports. External SSDs are operating at the speed of the PCIe bus.

Fast internal PCIe storage isn't needed with AS using TB 4/5 ports. External SSDs are operating at the speed of the PCIe bus.

I'm not familiar with this kind of hardware (My experience dates back to things like SCSI and VMS VAX/Alpha clusters... )

What kinds of PCIe cards would you put in a current/modern Mac Pro other than storage? Other than having fewer cables with internal storage? Is there some special card that you can only get for a Mac Pro?

 

[CommanderJameson]

Except for the baseline MBP, you also get more CPU/GPU cores. Whether or not that matters to you depends hugely on what you're doing with the machine. I've certainly run calculations on my M1 Pro machine that railed all of the performance cores for minutes or hours at a time (Monte Carlo sims, hybrid CPU and GPU load). Doing that on an Air would have taken much longer; half as many cores and no fan so it throttles back due to thermal limits after a short period.

Yeah, but if you’re buying a base spec machine, the number of cores is likely irrelevant. It’s one of those “if you have to ask…” scenarios.

You’re a technical user*; you know your workload, and you know about cores’n’shit. You don’t need to ask.

I once got absolutely beasted in r/macbookpro for suggesting that most denizens of the sub would be well-served with an off-the-shelf base-spec MacBook Air, where the most impactful decision in the buying process would be the colour.

I was fuckin’ right tho.


_{*I abhor and despise the term “power user”, and regard anyone who self-identifies thus as almost certainly not one.}

 

[TenacityOverAptitude]

If you order a M4 Pro or max now, do you get a M5 given the ship date would be well past the announcement?

Does anyone know what happens to existing orders when they cross an announcement date?

I don’t believe that they automatically upgrade your order, but when buying direct from Apple you usually have 30 days to return it, no questions asked.

 

[0x6019]

I'm not familiar with this kind of hardware (My experience dates back to things like SCSI and VMS VAX/Alpha clusters... )

What kinds of PCIe cards would you put in a current/modern Mac Pro other than storage? Other than having fewer cables with internal storage? Is there some special card that you can only get for a Mac Pro?

There are quite a few cards with video I/O over SDI or audio I/O over protocols like MADI plus some cards that do professional AV over IP protocols like Dante and SMPTE 2110 that have hardware features like routing and effects processing that you wouldn't get from a normal ethernet card.

 

[Quantum_Fab]

Last chance to grab it without an OLED screen. I would just wait for the fall for the full refresh.

 

[Dumdums]

It appears a lot of fellow Mac enthusiasts have PTSD of the days when buying a new Mac (which used 18-24 month old Intel processors) only to see a new model released weeks or a couple of months later. Friends would ask me when I thought the next model was going to be released. Huge buyer regret and lots of forum whining!
Thankfully with Apple Silicon we no longer need to fear buying a stale Mac model. Apple ditching Intel for Macs and never considering them for mobile should have been a wakeup call for Intel.

 

[Maclaren Mcgregor]

Reading and commenting on my $25** 2012 Mac Mini via Ebay. It is running Mint. Great computer***.

Ah hah, the solution, we will all switch to 14 year old machines running OS versions so old that that they no longer receive security updates. Let us see how that scales.

 

[eas]

Typical. You wait ten years to upgrade your trusty MBP and six weeks later they release a newer model.

If you were fine with a 9yo MacBook last year then you probably don't need the latest and greatest this year, do you?

 

[TwoKiloBalls]

I think it's more likely just the ram shortages. Apple are probably trying to produce as few as possible so they don't have to eat the cost.

 

[RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha]

Perhaps the Overdue M5Max for the 16"MBP... and a M5 MBAir...

 

[cfinazzo]

I don't understand why they don't commit to updating the Mac Pro more regularly. Even if it's not a moneymaker, I would think making the effort to update it on a regular cadence (every two years?) would be a reassuring signal to Apple devs.

The volume is in laptops, even for developers or areas like scientific computing, where you might be sending high performance jobs off to a server farm/cluster to do the heavy lifting.

That said, I do miss the time when it was possible to get a traditional desktop form factor for ~$2500.

 

[cfinazzo]

P.S. there is a racked version of Mac Pro. Drop the tower version . Upgrade the slots and SoC . Not a 1-2U server box, but folks could use it as a server box if they wished.

The complaints about how the Mac Pro has been left to rot on the vine are specifically about the lack of a traditional tower with upgradable parts.

I don't think many people are going to put a 2-3U rack on their deck

 

[Frank C.]

Christmas 2026? A gift to myself? We'll see.

 

[Evil Lair]

A current M4 would still be my choice as the new M5 will likely force you to use Tahoe.

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

The biggest problem is lacking a clear purpose. Big box macs were always aimed at users that needed expansion and upgrade options. With Apple’s move to SOCs it severely limits what can be done. Even though the trash can Mac was derided, it was the future of professional Macs. There wasn’t a reason to refresh them, as almost everyone has moved to using Mac studios. A new niche has presented itself though. A new rack mountable Mac Pro with the option to fit extra SOCs inside in a mesh would be very desirable for those wanting to run local LLMs. Were it not for this I think big box macs would have been left to die.

The pieces are in place with RDMA over Thunderbolt

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/15-tb-vram-on-mac-studio-rdma-over-thunderbolt-5/

 

[drumhellar916]

I'm excited for this, as I am overdue for a refresh at work and my dept. head has been waiting for the M5 Pros to come out before upgrading me from my 14" M1.

This M1 is plenty fast, but dang I'd like to be able to attach more than 1 monitor.

 

[Edubfromktown]

Your milage may vary, but in my opinion, unless you are doing something truly pushing the bleeding edge tech-wise, I'm not sure all these M3 vs M4 vs M5 conversations matter much in the real world and are more for number-flexing on a spec sheet.

I do dev work with some high end photography on the side and went from an M1 air to an M3 15-inch air to currently rocking an M4-Pro MBP and to be honest...I am not sure I could really tell a difference between the three in real-world usage for me. They all boot up and run Visual Studio/VSCode, run Pixlemator Pro/Photoshop and all the other "normal day" software for me without any issues.

Don't let spec-sheet fomo bring you down; the Apple Silicon chips are so powerful and efficient even M1s are still perfectly viable in most use cases.

True.

I the storage I/O of my M1 Studio Max is still quite snappy compared to my Pro M3 14" MBP. Both of these systems do more than ok for everything I throw at them and no FOMO pangs to get something newer are in my vacuous mind.

Having throughput above TB3 would be nice at some point but then I'd have to:

Upgrade from my trusty Caldigit TS3+

Obtain higher performance external storage. I currently use dual external RAID-0 striped Kingston 3000 NVMe v2's. They are the older/faster ones with onboard cache, compared to today's stripped down offerings.

 

[Faceless Man]

As a rule, bugger hooks stay off my M4 Pro photo editing screen. I can’t figure out why people want this. At work we have Dell touch screen laptops. NOBODY uses it.

You don't want greasy fingerprints all over your nice, shiny, Retina display?

A touch screen is a compromise for a portable device where using a full keyboard and/or mouse/trackpad isn't practical. It's great for a small device like a phone, or a medium device like a tablet or bookreader. But if you can use a proper keyboard and pointing device, you don't need a touch screen. Hence the popularity of external keyboards for iPads, etc. So I don't get the reasoning for a touchscreen Mac, and I'd rather not have to pay for one if I don't need it.

 

[barackorama]

LLM hobbyists are already well-served by Apple's current offerings, e.g., a Mac Studio with 128GB of RAM.

And actually you can connect several Mac Studios together into a cluster to improve LLM performance.*

A Mac Pro with some accelerator cards would not be "throwing a bomb" into anything.

* Edit: Oops, same thing Itonars said in the post right above this.

Sure, but I’m really talking about the prosumer/freelancer/small business space here. The Prompt Prefill and Inference numbers on the Studio aren’t that great and become relatively infeasible for agentic workflows unless the Studio is only running an orchestrator model with another networked machine (that has a gpu) actually running a small model to quickly do the grunt work.

The difference is quite big.

 

[____]

Your milage may vary, but in my opinion, unless you are doing something truly pushing the bleeding edge tech-wise, I'm not sure all these M3 vs M4 vs M5 conversations matter much in the real world and are more for number-flexing on a spec sheet.

I do dev work with some high end photography on the side and went from an M1 air to an M3 15-inch air to currently rocking an M4-Pro MBP and to be honest...I am not sure I could really tell a difference between the three in real-world usage for me. They all boot up and run Visual Studio/VSCode, run Pixlemator Pro/Photoshop and all the other "normal day" software for me without any issues.

Don't let spec-sheet fomo bring you down; the Apple Silicon chips are so powerful and efficient even M1s are still perfectly viable in most use cases.

How about cyberpunk 2077?

 

[/or\]

Current Macminin at 449 looks good at microcenter. Great start for doze afixianados. (two puns ina day)

 

[SraCet]

Sure, but I’m really talking about the prosumer/freelancer/small business space here. The Prompt Prefill and Inference numbers on the Studio aren’t that great and become relatively infeasible for agentic workflows unless the Studio is only running an orchestrator model with another networked machine (that has a gpu) actually running a small model to quickly do the grunt work.

The difference is quite big.

Okay, let's say that Apple releases your hypothetical M5 Ultra Mac Pro with slots for "AI accelerator cards."

How would that be any different from creating a cluster of Mac Studios?