Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality three-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio. It also now includes powerful Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, providing more downstream connectivity for high-speed accessories or daisy-chaining displays. The all-new Studio Display XDR takes the pro display experience to the next level. Its 27-inch 5K Retina XDR display features an advanced mini-LED backlight with over 2,000 local dimming zones, up to 1000 nits of SDR brightness, and 2000 nits of peak HDR brightness, in addition to a wider color gamut, so content jumps off the screen with breathtaking contrast, vibrancy, and accuracy. With its 120Hz refresh rate, Studio Display XDR is even more responsive to content in motion, and Adaptive Sync dynamically adjusts frame rates for content like video playback or graphically intense games. Studio Display XDR offers the same advanced camera and audio system as Studio Display, as well as Thunderbolt 5 connectivity to simplify pro workflow setups. The new Studio Display with a tilt-adjustable stand starts at $1,599, and Studio Display XDR with a tilt- and height-adjustable stand starts at $3,299. Both are available in standard or nano-texture glass options, and can be pre-ordered starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.

Compared to the first-generation Studio Display (March 2022), the updated model really just has a better camera. (Wouldn’t take much to improve upon the old camera.) The Studio Display XDR is the interesting new one. Apple doesn’t seem to have a “Compare” page for its displays, so the Studio Display Tech Specs and Studio Display XDR Tech Specs pages will have to suffice. Update: The main “Displays” page at Apple’s website serves as a comparison page between the new Studio Display and Studio Display XDR.

The regular Studio Display maxes out at 600 nits, and only supports a refresh rate of 60 Hz. The Studio Display XDR maxes out at 1,000 nits for SDR content and 2,000 nits for HDR, with up to 120 Hz refresh rate. Nice, but not enough to tempt me to upgrade from my current Studio Display with nano-texture, which I never seem to run at maximum brightness. I guess it would be nice to see HDR content, but not nice enough to spend $3,600 to get one with nano-texture. And I don’t think I care about 120 Hz on my Mac?

Unresolved is what this means for the Pro Display XDR, which remains unchanged since its debut in 2019. Update 1: Whoops, apparently this has been resolved. A small-print note on the Newsroom announcement states:

Studio Display XDR replaces Pro Display XDR and starts at $3,299 (U.S.) and $3,199 (U.S.) for education.

Update 2: I neglected to mention what might be the biggest upgrade: Thunderbolt 5 with support for daisy-chaining multiple displays. With the original Studio Display (and Pro Display XDR), each external display needed a cable connecting it to your Mac. Now, you can connect your Mac to one Studio Display, connect that one to a second, and connect the second to a third. Nice.

Apple Newsroom:

MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless connectivity on the go. MacBook Air features a beautifully thin, light, and durable aluminum design, stunning Liquid Retina display, 12MP Center Stage camera, up to 18 hours of battery life, an immersive sound system with Spatial Audio, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports with support for up to two external displays.

Base storage went from 256 to 512 GB, but the base price went from the magic $999 to $1,100 ($1,099, technically, which doesn’t make the 99 seem magic). Presumably, those in the market for a $999 MacBook will buy the new about-to-be-announced-tomorrow lower-priced MacBook “Neo”, which I’m guessing will start at $800 ($799), maybe as low as $700 ($699), but will surely have higher-priced configurations for additional storage. Today’s new M5 MacBook Airs have storage upgrades of:

• 1 TB (+ $200)
• 2 TB (+ $600)
• 4 TB (+ $1,200)

Colors remain unchanged (and in my opinion, boring): midnight, starlight, silver, sky blue (almost black, gold-ish gray, gray, blue-ish gray). RAM options remain unchanged too: 16, 24, or 32 GB.

A comparison page showing the new M5 Air, old M4 Air, and base M5 MacBook Pro suggests not much else is new year-over-year, other than the Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support from the N1 chip.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.

My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory bandwidth, altogether delivering up to 4× AI performance compared to the previous generation, and up to 8× AI performance compared to M1 models. This allows developers, researchers, business professionals, and creatives to unlock new AI-enabled workflows right on MacBook Pro. It now comes with up to 2× faster SSD performance and starts at 1TB of storage for M5 Pro and 2TB for M5 Max. The new MacBook Pro includes N1, an Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, bringing improved performance and reliability to wireless connections. It also offers up to 24 hours of battery life; a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display with a nano-texture option; a wide array of connectivity, including Thunderbolt 5; a 12MP Center Stage camera; studio-quality mics; an immersive six-speaker sound system; Apple Intelligence features; and the power of macOS Tahoe. The new MacBook Pro comes in space black and silver, and is available to pre-order starting tomorrow, March 4, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.

The MacBook Pro Tech Specs page is a good place to start to compare the entire M5 MacBook Pro lineup. One noteworthy change is that last year’s M4 Pro models only supported 24 or 48 GB of RAM; the new M5 Pro models support 24, 48, and 64 GB. Memory configurations for the M5 Max are unchanged from the M4 Max: 36, 48, 64, and 128 GB. (You could get an M4 Pro chip with 64 GB, but only on the Mac Mini.)

Also worth noting — Apple’s RAM pricing remains unchanged, despite the spike in memory prices industry-wide. With the “full” M5 Max chip (18-core CPU, 40-core GPU — there’s a lesser configuration with “only” 32 GPU cores for -⁠$300), base memory is 48 GB. Upgrading to 64 GB costs $200, and upgrading to 128 GB costs $1,000. Same prices as last year. This means the price for a MacBook Pro with 64 GB of RAM — if that’s your main concern — dropped by $800 year over year. Last year you needed to buy one with the high-end M4 Max chip to get 64 GB; now you can configure a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro with 64 GB. Nice!

Ben Thompson and I wagered a steak dinner on this on Dithering. Ben bet on Apple’s memory prices going up; I bet on them staying the same. My thinking was that this industry-wide spike in RAM prices is exactly why Apple has always charged more for memory — “just in case”. I’m going to enjoy that steak.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core design, now called super cores, that are the world’s fastest CPU core. Alongside these cores are 12 all-new performance cores, optimized for power-efficient, multithreaded workloads. [...]

The industry-leading super core was first introduced as performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for all M5-based products — MacBook Air, the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro. This core is the highest-performance core design with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, driven in part by increased front-end bandwidth, a new cache hierarchy, and enhanced branch prediction.

M5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance core that is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads. Together with the super cores, the chips deliver up to 2.5× higher multithreaded performance than M1 Pro and M1 Max. The super cores and performance cores give MacBook Pro a huge performance boost to handle the most CPU-intensive pro workloads, like analyzing complex data or running demanding simulations with unparalleled ease.

This is a bit confusing, but I think — after a media briefing with Apple reps this morning — I’ve got it straight. From the M1 through M4, there were two CPU core types: efficiency and performance. When the regular M5 chip debuted in October, Apple continued using those same names, efficiency and performance, for its two core types. But as of today, they’re renaming them, and introducing a third core type that they’re calling “performance”. They’re reusing the old performance name for an altogether new CPU core type. So you can see what I mean about it being confusing.

There are now three core types in M5-series CPUs. Efficiency cores are still “efficiency”, but they’re only in the base M5. What used to be called “performance” cores are now called “super” cores, and they’re present in all M5 chips. The new core type — more power-efficient than super cores, more performant than efficiency cores — are taking the old name “performance”. Here are the core counts in table form, with separate rows for the 15- and 18-core M5 Pro variants:

Another way to think about it is that there are regular efficiency cores in the plain M5, and new higher-performing efficiency cores called “performance” in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The problem is that the old M1–M4 names were clear — one CPU core type was fast but optimized for efficiency so they called it “efficiency”, and the other core type was efficient but optimized for performance so they called it “performance”. Now, the new “performance” core types are the optimized-for-efficiency CPU cores in the Pro and Max chips, and despite their name, they’re not the most performant cores.