Apple Unveils New M5 MacBooks, Studio Displays
Apple on Tuesday announced refreshed M5 MacBooks, as well as two Studio Displays.
First, the laptops. The MacBook Air is “supercharged,” according to Apple, by the base M5 chip and, perhaps most notably, has a higher starting price of $1099. For that extra $100, however, buyers get 512GB of storage to start, with the ability to max it out at 4TB “for the first time,” Apple said in its press release. (RAM starts at 16GB, maxing out at 32GB.) The MacBook Air, hailed by the company as “the world’s most popular laptop,” is touted as having an even stronger value proposition with its next-generation silicon.
The MacBook Pro, the 14” variant of which received the base M5 back in October, now come equipped with the souped-up M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The higher-end processors “supercharge the most demanding pro workflows,” Apple says, and notably are built using an all-new, Apple-designed “Fusion Architecture” which “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.” Like the Air, the Pros have a higher starting price: $2199.
As for the Studio Displays… my “new” Pro Display XDR is no longer. The 32” 6K, $4999 monitor has been replaced by the $3299 Studio Display XDR, which Apple calls “the world’s best pro display.” It’s essentially identical to the base Studio Display with its 27” screen and 5K resolution, but ups the ante by using a mini-LED backlight, 2000 nits of peak brightness, and variable refresh rate of 120Hz. It also comes with the tilt- and height-adjustable stand out of the box. As my pal John Gruber writes, the standard Studio Display isn’t much different other than a better 12MP Center Stage camera.
From an accessibility perspective, the Studio Display XDR’s 120Hz panel cuts both ways. While it’s a welcome addition in terms of technological advancement, its practicality is dubious because the benefits are dependent on one’s vision. If you, like me, have low enough vision that you literally can’t tell a meaningful difference between, say, 60Hz and 120Hz, then the “advancement” is mostly academic. The gadget reviewers and YouTubers who prattle on about “120Hz or bust” on Apple devices aren’t wrong, per se, in banging their drum, but nonetheless over-emphasize the benefits in day-to-day usage because they’re not visually impaired. In other words, it hardly occurs to most that literally not everyone will, or can, notice smoother scrolling on the Studio Display XDR—not to mention ProMotion on an iPhone or iPad.
Anyway, it goes without saying I’ll be sticking with my Pro Display XDR for a while.
My MacBook Air is the M2 model from 2022. I got it as a belated Christmas gift; it has maxed-out RAM (24GB) and a 512GB SSD. It’s a great machine, updated to macOS Tahoe even, that I should really use more often—if only as an excuse to get me out of the house. The industrial design remains unchanged in the “better” M5 model, and performance-wise, plain text files and videoconferencing don’t exactly push the M2’s envelope in terms of compute power. (On my desk, my 2023 14” M2 Pro MacBook Pro is running with aplomb, however behind three generations. So it goes with technology.)
