Apple Releases New Generation MacBook with AI Computing Power Surge and Storage Price Hike Sparks "Cook's Knife Technique"

Caixin News Agency, March 4 (Editor: Shi Zhengcheng) On Tuesday evening, Beijing time, Apple announced updates to its MacBook lineup during the second wave of spring product launches, including the MacBook Air powered by the M5 chip and the MacBook Pro equipped with the new M5 Pro/M5 Max chips.

From an investment market perspective, facing the pressure of widespread price increases in storage chips, Apple has adopted a very interesting strategy: cutting basic storage models to make overall starting prices less difficult to accept. At the same time, raising the overall pricing level of the models helps absorb the cost increases in storage.

Apple stated that the M5 version of the MacBook Air doubles the starting storage to 512GB and offers a maximum of 4TB storage options for the first time, with new SSD read/write performance doubling that of the previous generation. In terms of pricing, the base M5 MacBook Air is priced at $1,099 (8499 RMB in China), which is $100 and 500 RMB more than the M4 version.

The situation with the MacBook Pro is similar. The starting price for the 14-inch M5 Pro model is $2,199 (17,999 RMB in China), $200 and 1,000 RMB more than the M4 models, but the starting storage capacity has doubled from 512GB to 1TB.

It is worth noting that Apple also announced in small print at the end of the press release that the M5 version MacBook Pro launched last fall will only be available with a starting storage of 1TB. Therefore, the starting price has increased from 12,999 RMB for the 512GB version to 13,499 RMB.

Apple also maintained the same prices for memory upgrades. Overall, upgrading the 14-inch model from 24GB to 48GB costs $400. Upgrading from 48GB to 64GB costs an additional $200, and to 128GB costs an extra $1,000. These memory options are tied to higher-end CPU configurations, with pricing identical to the M4 Pro series.

Consistent with prior leaks, Apple’s M5 Pro/M5 Max chips also utilize TSMC’s SoIC-MH packaging process, achieving CPU and GPU decoupling. During the M1 to M4 era, Apple’s Pro and Max chips were essentially composed of two or four basic chips spliced together. But in the M5 era, Apple has adopted a new integrated architecture, combining two chip dies into a single chip system (SoC).

The M5 Pro features up to 18 CPU cores (6 “super cores” + 12 performance cores) and up to 20 GPU cores, with multi-threading capabilities increased by 30% compared to the M4 Pro, and peak GPU performance for AI tasks increased fourfold over the previous generation.

The M5 Max shares the same architecture as the M5 Pro, with a standard 18-core CPU and up to 40 GPU cores, with AI computing power also exceeding four times that of the previous generation. This new architecture means that if you want a high-end GPU configuration, the only option is the M5 Max.