With Mac recently completing the transition to M4, Apple began mass-producing the M5 chips earlier this year. Since then, rumors that the MacBook Pro will be the first to sport the new chipset have been making rounds online. With a potential rollout by the end of 2025, anticipation for the next-gen Mac is at its peak. Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming M5 MacBook Pro.
M5 MacBook Pro: Design
The M5 MacBook Pro will retain the same design as its predecessor, complete with a Liquid Retina XDR display and a notch. The utilitarian design introduced in 2021 still looks pretty good after four years, and there isn’t any reason for Apple to move away from it for the time being. Although the overall aesthetics will remain the same, we might get to see a new color option and an updated 12MP FaceTime camera.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple is saving a major design overhaul with a thinner housing for 2026. Moreover, reports from Omdia and The Elec suggest that the 2026 MacBook models will potentially offer an OLED display. Apple may even shift away from the notch to a hole-punch in 2026.
M5 MacBook Pro: Specifications
Apple’s new laptops will be available in three configs including the base M5, M5 Pro, and M5 Max. While the exact core counts remain under wraps, the M5 chips are expected to be fabbed using TSMC’s 3nm process. With System on Integrated Chip (SoIC) technology, the new chips will deliver better efficiency and thermal management. This should result in around 15% to 25% performance gains over the M4 series.
Other potential spec bumps include the adoption of Wi-Fi 7 for faster connectivity and Thunderbolt 5 ports across all models. Moreover, storage and RAM configurations are also likely to reflect the current lineup. We may get to see up to 8TB of SSD storage and 64GB of unified memory on higher-end models.
M5 MacBook Pro: Expected Release Date
With several reports suggesting that Apple’s M5 chips have already been in production since February, we can expect the first M5 MacBook Pro models to arrive in the fall of 2025. This seems very likely as, excluding the M2 MacBook Pro, all MacBook Pro models with Apple Silicon were unveiled in October.