Posts tagged with "macbook pro"

Apple Debuts New 14” MacBook Pro with the M5 Chip

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple debuted the new 14” MacBook Pro with its latest M5 chip, which is available for purchase now alongside the existing M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro models.

According to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering:

MacBook Pro continues to be the world’s best pro laptop, and today, the 14-inch MacBook Pro gets even better with the arrival of the M5 chip. M5 marks the next big leap in AI for the Mac, and delivers a huge boost in graphics performance accelerating demanding workflows for everyone from students to creatives, developers to business professionals, and more. With its amazing performance, extraordinary battery life, and unrivaled display, M5 takes the new 14-inch MacBook Pro to another level.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple’s new M5 processor is the star of today’s MacBook Pro update. Apple says that the chip, which is only available in the 14” MacBook Pro configuration, is faster at AI workflows and file transfers and can last 24 hours on a single charge. The M5 chip includes an all-new GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core, which Apple claims speeds up AI workflows up to 3.5× compared to the M4 chip and 6× compared to the M1 chip. The new MacBook Pro’s performance is also enhanced by a new 16-core Neural Engine and SSDs that are up to 2× faster and can be configured up to 4TB, which will make managing large files easier.

Although Apple makes a big deal of the 14” MacBook Pro’s AI performance, the new M5 chip will enhance all kinds of resource-heavy tasks, including these spotlighted by Apple in its press release:

  • Up to 7.7x faster AI video-enhancing performance in Topaz Video when compared to the 13‑inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.8x faster than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4.
  • Up to 6.8x faster 3D rendering in Blender when compared to the 13‑inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.7x faster than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4.
  • Up to 3.2x higher frame rates in games when compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.6x faster than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4.
  • Up to 2.1x faster build performance when compiling code in Xcode when compared to the 13‑inch MacBook Pro with M1, and up to 1.2x faster than the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4.

(See the press release for footnotes regarding testing details).

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Although I’m impatient to see what an M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro are capable of, and I’m dying to see a Mac Studio configured with the M5 generation of chips, I’m glad Apple didn’t wait to release the M5 in the 14” MacBook Pro. If the chip is ready, why not? Pro workloads, including running AI models locally, are only becoming more demanding, so getting the M5 into more hands as early as possible makes sense. Plus, for anyone coming from an Intel-based setup or an early-generation Apple silicon Mac, this update should be significant.

The new 14” MacBook Pro comes in Space Black and Silver and starts at $1,599 but can be configured to over $3,330. Pre-orders can be placed now, with deliveries and in-store availability beginning October 22.

What’s in My CES Bag?

Packing for CES has been a little different than WWDC. The biggest differences are the huge crowds at CES and the limits the conference puts on the bags you can carry into venues.

My trusty Tom Bihn Synapse 25 backpack isn’t big, but it’s too large for CES, so the first thing I did was look for a bag that was small enough to meet the CES security rules but big enough to hold my 14” MacBook Pro and 11” iPad Pro, plus accessories. I decided on a medium-sized Tomtoc Navigator T24 sling bag, which is the perfect size. It holds 7 liters of stuff and has built-in padding to protect the corners of the MacBook Pro and iPad as well as pockets on the inside and outside to help organize cables and other things.

Tomtoc's medium Navigator T24 sling bag. Source: Tomtoc.

Tomtoc’s medium Navigator T24 sling bag. Source: Tomtoc.

I don’t plan to carry my MacBook Pro with me during the day. The iPad Pro will be plenty for any writing and video production I do on the go, but it will be good to have the power and flexibility of the MacBook Pro when I return to my hotel room. For traveling to and from Las Vegas, I appreciate that the Tomtoc bag can fit everything I’m bringing.

A surprising amount of stuff fits in the T24. Source: Tomtoc.

A surprising amount of stuff fits in the T24. Source: Tomtoc.

With little room to spare, my setup is minimal. I’ll write on the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro, carrying the iPad with me tethered to my iPhone for Internet access. That’s a tried-and-true setup I already use whenever I’m away from home.

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Apple Reveals New M4 MacBook Pros

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

In its third and likely last Mac announcement this week, Apple revealed updates to the MacBook Pro line of laptops, which includes Pro and Max variants of the M4 chipsets in the same 14-inch and 16-inch form factors we’ve seen in the MacBook Pro line for the past few years.

According to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering:

MacBook Pro is an incredibly powerful tool that millions of people use to do their life’s best work, and today we’re making it even better. With the powerful M4 family of chips, and packed with pro features like Thunderbolt 5, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, an all-new nano-texture display option, and Apple Intelligence, the new MacBook Pro continues to be, by far, the world’s best pro laptop.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Regarding the M4 family of chips, Apple says:

Built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, the M4 family is the most advanced lineup of chips for a personal computer. The M4 family features phenomenal single-threaded CPU performance with the world’s fastest CPU core,2 along with outstanding multithreaded CPU performance for the most demanding workloads. Combined with machine learning accelerators in the CPU, an advanced GPU, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine, Apple silicon is built from the ground up to deliver incredible performance for AI. Together with faster unified memory, each chip also includes increased memory bandwidth, so large language models (LLMs) and other large projects run smoothly and on device.

The company also released a video touting the changes to the MacBook Pro line:

Highlights of the revised MacBook Pro line include:

  • Thunderbolt 5 ports on the Pro and Max models
  • Thunderbolt 4 on the base model M4 MacBook Pro, including an additional third port
  • Storage options ranging from 1TB to 8TB depending on the model you choose
  • A nano-texture display option
  • Support for two external displays
  • A 12MP Center Stage Camera like the one on the iMac released earlier this week
  • Up to 24 hours of battery life
  • A 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and 16–32GB of memory with 120GB/s of bandwidth on the entry-level M4 MacBook Pro
  • A 14-core CPU and a 20-core GPU on the M4 Pro version of the MacBook Pro
  • A 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and up to 128GB of memory on the M4 Max version of the MacBook Pro
  • Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3
Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

I’ve been using an M3 MacBook Pro for about a year, and it’s a fantastic laptop. With the added speed and Thunderbolt 5, the latest MacBook Pros should be an attractive upgrade for a lot of users. I look forward to seeing how they stack up in real-world tests against previous models of Apple’s high-end laptop.

The new MacBook Pro is available for pre-order today, with deliveries and in-store availability beginning on November 8th. The M4 MacBook Pro starts at $1,599, the M4 Pro model starts at $1,999, and the M4 Max model starts at $2,299.

What’s in My WWDC 2024 Bag?

My [Tom Bihn Synapse 25](https://www.tombihn.com/collections/backpacks/products/synapse-25?variant=42796481904829) backpack.

My Tom Bihn Synapse 25 backpack.

It’s time to get packed for WWDC, and like most years, my carry-on bag will be stuffed with everything I need to cover the event for MacStories. This year, I’ve focused on streamlining my podcast recording setup after some problems that slowed me down last year. Built around my everyday ‘away from home’ setup that I’ve been using for several months, I think I finally have a simple yet powerful writing and podcasting travel setup that should serve me well on the trip.

11" M4 iPad Pro and MacBook Pro.

11” M4 iPad Pro and MacBook Pro.

The center of my setup will be a 14” M3 Max MacBook Pro that Apple sent me for testing. It’s a fantastic computer that’s more than capable of handling the research, writing, and audio production work I’ll be doing, along with any video taken during the week.

I’ll also take my new 11” iPad Pro, which should help lighten my bag when I’m traveling back and forth from my hotel to Apple Park. Swapping my old 12.9” iPad Pro for the new 11” model will be perfect for this sort of trip. I plan to use it for getting some work done on the flight to California and for taking notes at the WWDC keynote. It’s hard to jot much down during the event while you’re sitting outside in the sun, so anything more than my iPad would be overkill.

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Logitech’s Casa Pop-Up Desk Elevates Your MacBook for More Comfortable Computing

When I’m sitting at home in my office, the ergonomics are perfect. I have a comfortable chair with plenty of back support, my keyboard is at the right height, and my Studio Display is at eye level. The trouble is, that’s not the only place I work or want to work. As a result, I spend time almost daily using a laptop in less-than-ideal conditions. That’s why I was eager to try the Logitech’s Casa Pop-Up Desk that debuted in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand last summer and is now available in North America, too.

Logitech sent me the Casa to test, and I’ve been using it on and off throughout the past 10 days as I work at home, away from my desk, and in various other locations. No portable desktop setup is going to rival the ergonomics of my home office, but despite a few downsides, I’ve been impressed with the Casa. By making it more comfortable to use my laptop anywhere, the Casa has enabled me to get away from my desk more often, which has been wonderful as the weather begins to warm up.

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Jason Snell’s Hands-On with the M3 MacBook Pros and iMac→

Jason Snell of Six Colors got a sneak peek at the new Macs announced at yesterday’s Scary Fast Apple event. A lot of specs were thrown around by the company yesterday, but a software feature called Dynamic Caching really stood out because it’s clear that Apple is doing all it can to squeeze every bit of performance out of its GPUs. Jason’s explanation of how it works is excellent:

There’s also a big new feature Apple is calling Dynamic Caching. Put very simply, Apple’s chip engineers were extremely motivated to eke out even more performance from their graphics subsystem—and found that the way memory was traditionally allocated was inefficient. Memory is usually allocated to different threads at compile time, meaning that some threads allocate a larger amount of memory in order to handle peak need, while other threads might choose a smaller amount of memory but risk a bottleneck.

The M3’s graphics system dynamically allocates the memory per thread in a way that’s completely transparent to software developers. Apps don’t need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new system, which Apple says makes some huge gains by wringing a lot of memory efficiency out of the system. Memory that was previously reserved for a specific thread can be given to a different thread instead. A thread that’s in a bottleneck can be given more space. It’s all to the goal of increasing overall throughput.

The fact that these improvements come ‘for free,’ meaning developers don’t have to change their apps or games to take advantage of Dynamic Caching, is at least as important as the efficiency gains enabled by the technology. Especially when it comes to things like videogames, the more Apple can do to make it easy for developers to take advantage of Apple silicon Macs, the better.

Jason also got some hands-on time with the new MacBook Pros, including the new Space Black model:

I got my greasy monkey paws on a Space Black laptop and can report that Apple’s as good as its word in the sense that it seems generally more resistant to fingerprints and other smudges.

But I don’t want to exaggerate this feature: you can still see fingerprints. They just aren’t as prominent. This is a progressive improvement over something like the Midnight M2 MacBook Air, but it’s not a cure-all.

Despite its name, Jason reports that Space Black is more gray than black, but it’s still a noticeable shift from Space Gray.

With the details of the new Macs dissected, it’s going to be interesting to see how the M3 MacBook Pro’s latest CPU and GPU configurations perform relative to the M2 models that were released at the beginning of the year. As Jason also points out, the benchmarks we see from the new laptops and the M3 iMac should give us a good idea of how M3 MacBook Airs, Mac minis, and Mac Studios will perform when it’s their turn to be updated.

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Apple’s October 2023 Scary Fast Event: All The Small Things

Apple’s presentation moved fast this evening, and since the event concluded, more details have emerged about everything announced. We’ve been combing Apple’s product pages, social media, and other sources to learn more about everything announced, which we’ve collected below:

  • The 13” MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has been officially discontinued and is no longer available for sale, marking the end of the Touch Bar era at Apple.

  • None of the desktop accessories for the iMac – Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Keyboard – were updated with a USB-C connector (or any other features).

  • The new ‘Space Black’ color of the 14” and 16” MacBook Pros with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips is apparently not so black, based on first impressions from people who saw it in person already.

  • Speaking of the color black, Apple now sells a 2-meter, black USB-C to MagSafe cable.

  • As it turns out, ‘Scary Fast’ was applicable not only to the new M3 series chips unveiled today but also the unusually short runtime of the event, which clocked in at 30:32, judging from the presentation’s YouTube video.

  • The event video was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and edited on a Mac.

Not a very long list this time around, but at just over 30 minutes and no new accessories, there weren’t many tidbits surrounding this event I’m afraid.

You can follow all of our October 2023 Apple event coverage through our October 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated October 2023 Apple event RSS feed.

Apple’s October 2023 Scary Fast Event: By the Numbers

Today’s Scary Fast online Apple event was packed with facts, figures, and statistics throughout the presentation and elsewhere. We’ve pulled together the highlights.

M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max Chips

  • These are the first chips built on a 3-nanometer process.
  • This process can fit up to 2 million transistors in the cross-section of a human hair.
  • The M3 architecture grants up to 2.5x faster performance than the M1 generation.
  • The M3 CPU’s performance cores are 30% faster than M1 and 15% faster than M2; the efficiency cores are 50% faster than M1.
  • The Neural Engine is faster and more efficient in M3 as well. Specifically, it’s 60% faster than M1 and 15% faster than M2.
  • The M3 Max chip is up to 80% faster than the M1 Max.
  • The M3 has 25 billion transistors, while the M3 Pro has 37 billion, and the M3 Max has 92 billion.

MacBook Pro

  • The M3 Max MacBook Pro supports up to 128 GB of unified memory and 8 TB of storage, with a maximum 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU.
  • The M3 MacBook Pro can run for up to 22 hours on one charge, playing movies using the Apple TV app.
  • The new MacBook Pros are up to 11x faster than the last Intel-based models.

iMac

  • The M3 iMac is 2x faster than the M1 model, 2.5x faster than the 27-inch Intel model, and 4x faster than the 21.5-inch Intel-based iMac.
  • The M3 iMac has a 4.5K Retina display and features a 6-speaker sound system.
  • Apple offers up to 24 GB of unified memory and 2 TB of storage in the M3 iMac.

You can follow all of our October 2023 Apple event coverage through our October 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated October 2023 Apple event RSS feed.

Apple Introduces the New MacBook Pro in Three M3 Chip Configurations

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the rollout of Apple silicon Macs is that the old rules don’t apply, and the new ones are still being written. The cadence of releases is still settling in, and today, in the face of speculation that Apple was struggling to release M3 Macs, Apple made it clear that not one, but three 3 nanometer process-based chips are ready to ship. Along with the M3 iMac, the company refreshed its entire lineup of MacBook Pros, computers that gained the M2 chip less than a year ago.

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