Apple silicon

MacBook Neo hands-on: Apple build quality at a substantially lower price

Apple, Apple A18 Pro, Apple silicon, Mac, macbook neo, Tech / Mike M. / March 4, 2026

The Neo won’t be for everyone, but Apple has managed to preserve a premium feel.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

NEW YORK CITY—Whether you’re talking about the iBook, MacBook, or MacBook Air, Apple’s most basic laptops have started at or within $100 of the $1,000 price point for over 20 years. Sure, the company had quietly been testing the waters with a Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air configuration for several years, first at $699 and then at $599. But as far as what Apple would actively advertise and offer on its own site and in its own retail stores, we’ve never seen anything for substantially below $1,000.

The new MacBook Neo changes that. Apple has experimented with lower-cost products before, most notably with the $329 and $349 iPads and the old $429 iPhone SE. But this is the first time it has used that strategy for the Mac. The Neo starts at $599 for a version with 256GB of storage and no Touch ID sensor, and $699 for a version with Touch ID and 512GB of storage (each also available to educational customers for $100 less).

We had a chance to poke at a MacBook Neo for a while at Apple’s “special experience” event in New York this morning, and what I can tell you is that this does feel like an Apple laptop despite the lower starting price. It definitely has some spec sheet shortcomings, even compared to older M3 or M4 MacBook Airs that you still might be able to get at a discount from third-party retailers or Apple’s refurbished site—more on that in our full review next week. But it’s priced low enough to (1) appeal to people who might not have considered a Mac before, and (2) to make some of its borderline specs feel reasonable, and that’s enough to keep it interesting.

MacBook Air-ish

I had assumed, based on Apple’s history with its lower-end iPads and iPhones, that Apple would essentially reuse the design of the old M1 MacBook Air for this new MacBook. The Neo does share quite a few things in common with that older design, including a 13-inch notchless display, a 2.7 lb weight, and a lack of MagSafe connector. But this is actually a new design after all, one that’s more in line with the current Pro and Air iterations.

The Neo is a flat rectangular slab of aluminum with softly rounded edges, more like the current Airs and Pros than the wedge-shaped design of the old M1 Air (also like modern Airs, the words “MacBook Neo” appear nowhere on the exterior of the computer—the name only exists in stores and in software).

The low-end iPad can feel a bit cheap or hollow, partly because of the small gap between the front glass and the non-laminated LCD display underneath. But holding and interacting with the Neo feels substantially the same as interacting with an Air. It is, however, slightly thicker—an even 0.5 inches, up from 0.44 inches for the M4 Air.

The non-backlit keyboard is a bit of a bummer, although Apple has tried to keep it legible by shifting from white-on-black keycaps to darker legends on a lighter background. But the typing feel is similar to the Air, and we’re told the scissor switches have the same amount of key travel as the switches in the Air keyboards.

The multi-touch trackpad is a little weirder. It looks a lot like Apple’s other trackpads, but it actually has a physical clicking mechanism rather than the haptic feedback Apple has used in its laptop trackpads and Magic Trackpads for years. That means there’s no Force Click functionality and no controls for adjusting the firmness or noisiness of the clicking sensation.

Apple did, at least, figure out a mechanism that makes it feel the same to click anywhere on the trackpad. More traditional physical trackpads, including the ones Apple used to use, had a hinge toward the top of the trackpad that made clicking up there feel stiffer and firmer than clicking at the bottom or in the middle of the trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel quite as solid, probably because of the space left to make room for a physical clicking mechanism, but, aside from the missing haptics, it seems to work just as well as Apple’s other trackpads.

The laptop’s ports may cause some confusion, for the same reason that any USB-C or Thunderbolt port can cause confusion—the ports look the same but do different things. Either of the laptop’s two USB-C ports can charge the laptop. But only the rear one supports 10 Gbps USB 3 transfer speeds, and it’s also the only one that can drive a display (one 4K screen at up to 60 Hz, down from two higher-resolution external displays for the Air). The port toward the front only supports 480 Mbps USB 2.0 transfer speeds, enough for a keyboard and many other external accessories, but not ideal for external storage.

Neither port is marked in any way, though macOS will apparently alert users if they try to plug something into the USB 2.0 port that won’t work with it.

The four colors of Neo: the pink-ish Blush, blue-tinted Indigo, yellowy Citrus, and traditional MacBook silver. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The internal display is great for the price, though it falls a bit short of both the current Airs and the M1 Air. The 13-inch 2408×1506 IPS LCD screen is just shy of the old M1 Air’s resolution, and it supports both 500 nits of maximum brightness and full coverage of the sRGB color gamut, both relatively rare in similarly priced PCs. But it’s missing DCI-P3 wide color support and the True Tone feature that subtly adjusts the color temperature of the display based on ambient lighting, two things that were still supported by the old M1 Air.

The biggest sticking point for many buyers will be the processor, an Apple A18 Pro that first appeared in the iPhone 16 Pro.

This chip includes six CPU cores (two performance, four efficiency) and a five-core GPU, which worked just fine under casual use in the hands-on area and in our briefing. We saw it running Safari with multiple tabs open, playing a game, and running Pixelmator Pro, and it handled all three tasks well. But the higher-end apps that aren’t bottlenecked by the CPU or GPU may be bottlenecked by its 8GB of RAM instead.

We’ll do more testing in our review to figure out where people will notice the specs in the real world and where they won’t, but suffice it to say, this isn’t the best laptop to pick if you want to make the most of a Creator Studio subscription.

All in all, the MacBook Neo seems well-positioned to satisfy those whom Apple is marketing it toward. Predominantly, that seems to be iPhone users who don’t have any kind of computer yet, or people who are unhappy with their budget Windows PC or Chromebook. Apple’s product page makes a big deal about the features that work across iOS and macOS and has a dedicated “new to Mac” section that pitches the platform to people who have never used it. The biggest downside for Apple is the risk that the Neo’s 8GB RAM limit and less-powerful chip will end up frustrating people who buy a Mac hoping to use Final Cut or Logic and bump into the limits of the hardware.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon

Apple, Apple M5, apple m5 max, apple m5 pro, Apple silicon, Tech / Kris Guyer / March 3, 2026

Apple is using more chiplets and three types of CPU cores to make the M5 family.

As part of today’s MacBook Pro update, Apple has also unveiled the M5 Pro and M5 Max, the newest members of the M5 chip family.

Normally, the Pro and Max chips take the same basic building blocks from the basic chip and just scale them up—more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more memory bandwidth. But the M5 chips are a surprisingly large departure from past generations, both in terms of the CPU architectures they use and in how they’re packaged together.

We won’t know the impact these changes have had on performance until we have hardware in hand to test, but here are all the technical details we’ve been able to glean about the new updates and how the M5 chip family stacks up against the past few generations of Apple Silicon chips.

New Fusion Architecture and a third type of CPU core

Apple says that M5 Pro and M5 Max use an “all-new Fusion Architecture” that welds two silicon chiplets into a single processor. Apple has used this approach before, but historically only to combine two Max chips together into an Ultra.

Apple’s approach here is different—for example, the M5 Pro is not just a pair of M5 chips welded together. Rather, Apple has one chiplet handling the CPU and most of the I/O, and a second one that’s mainly for graphics, both built on the same 3nm TSMC manufacturing process.

The first silicon die is always the same, whether you get an M5 Pro or M5 Max. It includes the 18-core CPU, the 16-core Neural Engine, and controllers for the SSD, for the Thunderbolt ports, and for driving displays.

The second die is where the two chips differ; the M5 Pro gets up to 20 GPU cores, a single media encoding/decoding engine, and a memory controller with up to 307 GB/s of bandwidth. The M5 Max gets up to 40 GPU cores, a pair of media encoding/decoding engines, and a memory controller that provides up to 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth (note that everything in the GPU die seems to be doubled, implying that Apple is, in fact, sticking two M5 Pro GPUs together to make one M5 Max GPU).

Apple’s spec sheets now list three distinct types of CPU cores: “super” cores, performance cores, and efficiency cores. Credit: Apple

Apple is also introducing a third distinct type of CPU core beyond the typical “performance cores” and “efficiency cores” that were included in older M-series processors.

At the top, you have “super cores,” which is Apple’s new M5-era branding for what it used to call “performance cores.” This change is retroactive and also applies to the regular M5; Apple’s spec sheet for the M5 MacBook Pro used to refer to the big cores as “performance cores” but now calls them “super cores.”

At the bottom of the hierarchy, you still have “efficiency cores” that are tuned for low power usage. The M5 still uses six efficiency cores, and unlike the super cores, they haven’t been rebranded since yesterday. These cores do help with multi-core performance, but they prioritize lower power usage and lower temperatures first, since they need to fit in fanless devices like the iPad Pro and MacBook Air.

And now, in the middle, we have a new type of “performance core” used exclusively in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

These are, in fact, a new, third type of CPU core design, distinct from both the super cores and the M5’s efficiency cores. They apparently use designs similar to the super cores but prioritize multi-threaded performance rather than fast single-core performance. Apple’s approach with the new performance cores sounds similar to the one AMD uses in its laptop silicon: it has larger Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPU cores, optimized for peak clock speeds and higher power usage, and smaller Zen 4c and Zen 5c cores that support the same capabilities but run slower and are optimized to use less die space.

What we don’t know yet is how these new chips perform relative to the previous versions. Technically, the M4 Pro and M4 Max both had more “big” cores than the M5 Pro and M5 Max do—up to 10 for the M4 Pro and up to 12 for the M4 Max. But higher single-core performance from the six “super cores” and strong multi-core performance from the 12 performance cores should mean that the M5 generation still shakes out to be faster overall.

How all the chips compare

For Mac buyers choosing between these three processors, we’re updating the spec tables we’ve put together in the past, comparing the M5-generation chips to one another and to their counterparts in the M2, M3, and M4 generations.

Here’s how all of the M5 chips stack up, including the partly disabled versions of each chip that Apple sells in lower-end MacBook Air and Pro models:

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth	Video decode/encode engines
Apple M5 (low)	4S/6E	8	16GB	Up to three	153GB/s	One
Apple M5 (high)	4S/6E	10	16/24/32GB	Up to three	153GB/s	One
Apple M5 Pro (low)	5S/10P	16	24GB	Up to four	307GB/s	One
Apple M5 Pro (high)	6S/12P	20	24/48/64GB	Up to four	307GB/s	One
Apple M5 Max (low)	6S/12P	32	36GB	Up to five	460GB/s	Two
Apple M5 Max (high)	6S/12P	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	614GB/s	Two

Despite all the big under-the-hood changes, the basic hierarchy here remains the same as in past generations. The Pro tier offers the biggest bump to CPU performance compared to the basic M5, along with twice as many GPU cores. The Max chip is mainly meant for those who want better graphics, 128GB of RAM, or both.

Compared to M2, M3, and M4

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 (high)	4S/6E	8	16/24/32GB	Up to three	153GB/s
Apple M4 (high)	4P/6E	10	16/24/32GB	Up to three	120GB/s
Apple M3 (high)	4P/4E	10	8/16/24GB	Up to two	102.4GB/s
Apple M2 (high)	4P/4E	10	8/16/24GB	Up to two	102.4GB/s

Compared to past generations, the M5 looks like the basic incremental improvement that we’re used to—no huge jumps in CPU or GPU core counts, relying mostly on architectural improvements and memory bandwidth increases to deliver the expected generation-over-generation speed boost. The Pro and Max chips have similar graphics core counts across generations, but there has been more variability when it comes to the CPU cores.

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 Pro (high)	6S/12P	20	24/48/64GB	Up to four	307GB/s
Apple M4 Pro (high)	10P/4E	20	24/48/64GB	Up to three	273GB/s
Apple M3 Pro (high)	6P/6E	18	18/36GB	Up to three	153.6GB/s
Apple M2 Pro (high)	8P/4E	19	16/32GB	Up to three	204.8GB/s

The Pro chips have been sort of all over the place, and the M3 generation in particular is an outlier. When we tested it at the time, we found it to be more or less a wash compared to the M2 Pro, which was (and still is) rare for Apple Silicon generations. The M4 Pro was a better upgrade, and the M5 Pro should still feel like an improvement over the M4 Pro despite the big underlying changes.

	CPU S/P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M5 Max (high)	6S/12P	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	614GB/s
Apple M4 Max (high)	12P/4E	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	546GB/s
Apple M3 Max (high)	12P/4E	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s
Apple M2 Max (high)	8P/4E	38	64/96GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s

The M5 Max will be the biggest test for Apple’s new performance cores. According to our testing of the M5 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M5-generation super cores are about 12 to 15 percent faster than the M4 generation’s performance cores. The M4 Max had up to 12 of those cores, while the M5 Max only has six. That leaves a pretty substantial gap for M5 Max’s new non-super P-cores to close.

Aside from that, the biggest outstanding question is how the M5 shakeup changes Apple’s approach to Ultra chips, assuming the company continues to make them (Apple has already said that not every processor generation will see an Ultra update).

The M1 Ultra, M2 Ultra, and M3 Ultra were all made by fusing two Max chips together, perfectly doubling the CPU and GPU core counts. Will an M5 Ultra still weld two M5 Max chips together using the same basic ingredients to make an even larger processor? Or will Apple create distinct CPU and GPU chiplets just for the Ultra series? All we can say for sure is that we can no longer make assumptions based on Apple’s past behavior, which tends to be the most reliable predictor of its future behavior.

M5 Pro and M5 Max are surprisingly big departures from older Apple Silicon Read More »

New MacBook Airs come with M5, double the storage, and higher starting prices

Apple, Apple M5, Apple silicon, MacBook Air, Tech / Tim Belzer / March 3, 2026

Most of Apple’s laptop lineup is getting refreshed today—the high-end MacBook Pros are getting M5 Pro and M5 Max chip refreshes, and the MacBook Air is getting upgraded with an M5.

The more significant update might be the storage, though: Apple is bumping the Air’s base storage from 256GB up to 512GB, and Apple says the storage will be up to twice as fast as the M4 MacBook Air.

But that’s also increasing the Air’s starting price from $999 to $1,099 for the 13-inch model, and from $1,199 to $1,299 for the 15-inch model. Whether you describe this as a price increase or a price cut depends on your point of view; the 512GB version of the M4 MacBook Air would have cost you $1,199. But for people who just want the cheapest Air and don’t particularly care about the specs, the pricing is now $100 higher than it was before.

Apple is offering two versions of the M5 in the new Airs: one with 8 GPU cores enabled, and one with all 10 GPU cores enabled. Upgrading to the fully enabled chip will run you an extra $100, and you’ll also need to have the fully enabled chip to step up to the 24GB or 32GB RAM upgrades or the 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB storage upgrades. All versions of the M5 include a total of four high-performance cores—now dubbed “super cores”—and six efficiency cores.

An Apple N1 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip rounds out the internal upgrades.

Like the other products Apple has announced so far this week, the new MacBook Airs will be available for preorder on March 4, and you’ll be able to get them on March 11.

The new MacBook Airs are part of a string of announcements that Apple is making this week in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. So far, the company has also announced a new iPhone 17e, an updated iPad Air with an M4 chip and additional RAM, new MacBook Pros, and updated Studio Displays.

Increasing the starting price of the MacBook Air, incidentally, leaves even more room in Apple’s lineup for the new, cheaper MacBook that the company is said to be planning. If Apple is planning to launch this cheaper MacBook this week, the announcement will likely come tomorrow.

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Apple says it has “a big week ahead.” Here’s what we expect to see.

Apple, Apple silicon, ipad, IPhone, MacBook, Tech / Paul Patrick / February 28, 2026

it’s what’s on the inside that counts

Apple is taking an “ain’t broke/don’t fix” approach to most of its gadgets.

Apple’s 2018-era design for the then-Intel-powered MacBook Air. The M1 Air used largely the same design, and we expect Apple’s lower-cost MacBook to look pretty similar. Credit: Valentina Palladino

Excepting the AirTag 2, so far it’s been a quiet year for Apple hardware. But that’s poised to change next week, as the company is hosting a “special experience” on March 4.

The use of the word experience, rather than event or presentation, implies that Apple’s typical presentation format won’t apply here. And CEO Tim Cook more or less confirmed this when he posted that the company had “a big week ahead,” starting on Monday. Apple is most likely planning multiple days of product launches announced via press release on its Newsroom site, with the “experience” on Wednesday serving as a capper and a hands-on session for the media.

Apple has used a similar strategy before, spacing out relatively low-key refreshes over several days to generate sustained interest rather than dropping everything in a single 30- to 60-minute string of pre-recorded videos.

Reporting on what, exactly, Apple plans to announce has consistently centered on a small handful of specific devices, but with the exception of the iPhone 17 series, the M5 Vision Pro, and the Apple Watch, most of Apple’s major products have gone long enough without an update that anything is possible. Here’s what we consider to be the most likely, and a few other notes besides.

The long-awaited “budget” MacBook

Most rumors and leaks agree that Apple is preparing to launch a new MacBook priced well below the MacBook Air, in a style similar to the $349 iPad or the iPhone 16e. Commonly cited specs include a 13-inch-ish screen and an Apple A18 Pro chip, which debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro in 2024 and is typically packaged with 8GB of RAM. The laptop is also said to be coming in multiple colors, taking a page from the iMac and the basic iPad.

Rumors have circulated about a “cheap” MacBook purpose-built for cost-conscious buyers since the late 2000s, if not before. But none of these, if they’ve existed in Apple’s labs, have ever made it to stores, and Apple’s laptops have reliably started at around $1,000 for over 20 years.

But in the two years since removing it from its online store, Apple has used the old M1 MacBook Air design as a sort of trial balloon. Since early 2024, the laptop has only been available through Walmart in the US, with a basic 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. But it has been priced in the same $600 to $700 range as midrange Windows laptops and higher-end Chromebooks and has apparently done well enough to merit a true successor.

I expect Apple to follow a pattern similar to what it did when it first launched the $329 iPad in 2017, or the iPhone SE in 2016: to essentially re-use the 2020-era MacBook Air’s design and other components to the greatest degree possible.

These are already parts that Apple and its suppliers have a lot of experience manufacturing, and they’ve been around long enough that they’re probably about as inexpensive as they’re going to get. They’re also proven components that meet Apple’s usual standards for materials and build quality. If that leaves the new MacBook slightly out of step with the rest of Apple’s laptop designs, that’s a compromise the company has been willing to make in the past.

Some of the details of this system will probably be a surprise, but we can expect Apple to create some intentional distance between this MacBook and the MacBook Air, the same as it does for the low-end iPad and iPhone. The processor will be one limitation; the potential 8GB RAM ceiling, limited upgrade options, fewer and less-capable ports, and limited external display support may be others.

This thing is likely destined to be an email, browsing, and casual phone-camera-photo-editing machine for people who prefer a traditional clamshell laptop to an iPad. The $999-and-up MacBook Air will continue to be Apple’s default do-anything laptop, and the MacBook Pro will continue to occupy the “do-anything, but faster” position.

The $349 iPad

Apple’s basic $349 iPad could get an Apple Intelligence update, thanks to a processor and RAM bump. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Speaking of the Apple A18 series, Apple is apparently planning a refresh of its $349 base-model iPad that uses an A18 or possibly an A19. Assuming it still comes with 8GB of RAM—up from 6GB for the current Apple A16-powered iPad—either chip would help it clear the bar for Apple Intelligence support.

Apple doesn’t always update its basic iPad every year; in 2024, for instance, it got a price drop rather than a hardware refresh. But the A16 iPad is currently the only thing in the entire iPhone/iPad/Mac lineup without support for Apple Intelligence, a bundle of features that Apple markets pretty heavily despite their functional unevenness. That marketing campaign is likely to intensify when Apple finally releases its new Google Gemini-powered Siri update at some point this year.

Even if you don’t care about Apple Intelligence, a basic iPad with 8GB of RAM will be a win for most users, since you can use that extra RAM for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with AI. It’s the same amount of memory Apple has shipped with the iPad Air since the M1 model, and with several generations of iPad Pro. Even attached to a slower processor, this should still improve the multitasking and productivity experience on the tablet.

The iPhone 17e

Apple would let the old iPhone SE languish for at least a couple years between updates, but it’s apparently taking a different tack with the “e” iPhones.

The main star of this refresh is a new chip, which will supposedly be upgraded from an Apple A18 to an A19. It’s also said to be picking up MagSafe charging support, making it compatible with Apple-made and third-party accessories that magnetically clamp to the back of other iPhones.

Other than that, the rumor mill suggests that the 17e will stick with its notched screen rather than a Dynamic Island, and we’d be surprised to see it move beyond its basic one-lens camera. Assuming Apple sticks with the same $599 starting price, though, there will still be some awkward overlap between the iPhone 16 and the regular iPhone 17.

The iPad Air

Do you like the current iPad Air with the Apple M3? Or the last one with the Apple M2?

That’s lucky for you, because a next-generation iPad Air is likely to continue in the same vein, picking up a new chip but not changing much else. If you’re holding out for something more exciting, like improved screen technology, you’ll likely be disappointed.

There’s no word on whether the M4 might come with any other internal upgrades, like more RAM or increased storage in the base model. Either or both of those could spice up an otherwise straightforward update.

Other possibilities

Apple could update the remaining M4 family MacBook Pros (pictured) with M5 family replacements. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple could choose to refresh almost any of its Macs next week—only the low-end MacBook Pro has an M5 chip, and it has been at least a year since the rest of the lineup was last updated. There’s no refresh that would come as a true surprise, excepting maybe the Mac Pro that Apple has allegedly put “on the back burner” (again).

Higher-end MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max processors would be the most interesting updates, since they would be the first Macs to debut higher-end M5 family processors. But if you’re not desperate for an upgrade, it might be better to keep waiting a while longer. These M5 models are said to continue using the same design Apple has been using for the MacBook Pro for the last five years, and a more significant design update with OLED touchscreens and the Mac’s first Dynamic Island could be on the horizon.

M5 updates for the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air, the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Mac Studio could happen, too; none of these computers are said to be getting any kind of significant design overhaul this generation. I would, however, be surprised if Apple chose to refresh these Macs all at once. To update some models now and hold others back until later in the spring or maybe even until the Worldwide Developers Conference in June would be more in keeping with Apple’s past practice.

As for other devices, reports have circulated for months about an imminent update for the Apple TV box, last refreshed in 2022. It has yet to materialize and is not mentioned on any shortlist for next week’s announcements, but an update is well overdue, and a new chip like the A18 or A19 would be necessary if Apple wanted to start bringing Apple Intelligence features to tvOS.

The common theme to all of these refreshes is that we can expect their updates to happen primarily on the inside, rather than the outside. The inside of a device is often more important than the outside of it, and these kinds of chip-only updates are usually successful in keeping Apple’s hardware feeling fresh. Just don’t expect to have many interesting new things to look at.

Apple says it has “a big week ahead.” Here’s what we expect to see. Read More »

Software leaks point to the first Apple Silicon “iMac Pro,” among other devices

Apple, Apple silicon, iMac, Mac, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / Paul Patrick / December 16, 2025

Apple doesn’t like to talk about its upcoming products before it’s ready, but sometimes the company’s software does the talking for it. So far this week we’ve had a couple of software-related leaks that have outed products Apple is currently testing—one a pre-release build of iOS 26, and the other some leaked files from a kernel debug kit (both via MacRumors).

Most of the new devices referenced in these leaks are straightforward updates to products that already exist: a new Apple TV, a HomePod mini 2, new AirTags and AirPods, an M4 iPad Air, a 12th-generation iPad to replace the current A16 version, next-generation iPhones (including the 17e, 18, and the rumored foldable model), a new Studio Display model, some new smart home products we’ve already heard about elsewhere, and M5 updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and the other MacBook Pros. There’s also yet another reference to the lower-cost MacBook that Apple is apparently planning to replace the M1 MacBook Air it still sells via Walmart for $599.

For power users, though, the most interesting revelation might be that Apple is working on a higher-end Apple Silicon iMac powered by an M5 Max chip. The kernel debug kit references an iMac with the internal identifier J833c, based on a platform identified as H17C—and H17C is apparently based on the M5 Max, rather than a lower-end M5 chip. (For those who don’t have Apple’s branding memorized, “Max” is associated with Apple’s second-fastest chips; the M5 Max would be faster than the M5 or M5 Pro, but slower than the rumored M5 Ultra.)

This device could be the long-awaited, occasionally-rumored-but-never-launched replacement to Apple’s 27-inch iMac, which was discontinued in 2022 with no direct replacement. An M5 Max chip would also make this machine the closest thing we’ve seen to a direct replacement for the iMac Pro, a 27-inch iMac variant that was launched in late 2017 but likewise discontinued without an update or replacement.

The current M4 Max chip includes 14 or 16 CPU cores, 32 or 40 GPU cores, and between 36GB and 128GB of unified memory, specs we’d expect an M5 Max to match or beat. And because the Max chips already fit into the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, it should be no problem to fit one into an all-in-one desktop PC.

Software leaks point to the first Apple Silicon “iMac Pro,” among other devices Read More »

Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner”

Apple, Apple silicon, M2 Ultra, m3 ultra, m5 ultra, Mac Pro, Mac Studio, Tech / Kris Guyer / November 17, 2025

Do we still need a Mac Pro, though?

Regardless of what Apple does with the Mac Pro, the desktop makes less sense than ever in the Apple Silicon era. Part of the appeal of the early 2010s and the 2019 Mac Pro towers was their internal expandability, particularly with respect to storage, graphics cards, and RAM. But while the Apple Silicon Mac Pro does include six internal PCI Express slots, it supports neither RAM upgrades nor third-party GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Thunderbolt 5’s 120 Gbps transfer speeds are also more than fast enough to support high-speed external storage devices.

That leaves even the most powerful of power users with few practical reasons to prefer a $7,000 Mac Pro tower to a $4,000 Mac Studio. And that would be true even if both desktops used the same chip—currently, the M3 Ultra Studio comes with more and newer CPU cores, newer GPU cores, and 32GB more RAM for that price, making the comparison even more lopsided.

Mac Pro aside, the Mac should have a pretty active 2026. Every laptop other than the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro should get an Apple M5 upgrade, with Pro and Max chips coming for the higher-end Pros. Those chips, plus the M5 Ultra, would give Apple all the ingredients it would need to refresh the iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Studio lineups as well.

Insistent rumors also indicate that Apple will be introducing a new, lower-cost MacBook model with an iPhone-class chip inside, a device that seems made to replace the 2020 M1 MacBook Air that Apple has continued to sell via Walmart for between $600 and $650. It remains to be seen whether this new MacBook would remain a Walmart exclusive or if Apple also plans to offer the laptop through other retailers and its own store.

Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner” Read More »

macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica Review

Apple, Apple silicon, iMac, Intel Macs, Mac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, macOS, macos 26, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / Paul Patrick / September 15, 2025

Game Overlay

Tahoe’s new Game Overlay doesn’t add features so much as it groups existing gaming-related features to make them more easily accessible.

The overlay makes itself available any time you start a game, either via a keyboard shortcut or by clicking the rocketship icon in the menu bar while a game is running. The default view includes brightness and volume settings, toggles for your Mac’s energy mode (for turning on high-performance or low-power mode, when they’re available), a toggle for Game Mode, and access to controller settings when you’ve got one connected.

The second tab in the overlay displays achievements, challenges, and leaderboards for the game you’re playing—though only if they offer Apple’s implementation of those features. Achievements for games installed from Steam, for example, aren’t visible. And the last tab is for social features, like seeing your friends list or controlling chat settings (again, when you’re using Apple’s implementation).

More granular notification summaries

I didn’t think the Apple Intelligence notification summaries were very useful when they launched in iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia last year, and I don’t think iOS 26 or Tahoe really changes the quality of those summaries in any immediately appreciable way. But following a controversy earlier this year where the summaries botched major facts in breaking news stories, Apple turned notification summaries for news apps off entirely while it worked on fixes.

Those fixes, as we’ve detailed elsewhere, are more about warning users of potential inaccuracies than about preventing those inaccuracies in the first place.

Apple now provides three broad categories of notification summaries: those for news and entertainment apps, those for communication and social apps, and those for all other kinds of apps. Summaries for each category can be turned on or off independently, and the news and entertainment category has a big red disclaimer warning users to “verify information” in the individual news stories before jumping to conclusions. Summaries are italicized, get a special icon, and a “summarized by Apple Intelligence” badge, just to make super-ultra-sure that people are aware they’re not taking in raw data.

Personally, I think if Apple can’t fix the root of the problem in a situation like this, then it’s best to take the feature out of iOS and macOS entirely rather than risk giving even one person information that’s worse or less accurate than the information they already get by being a person on the Internet in 2025.

As we wrote a few months ago, asking a relatively small on-device language model to accurately summarize any stack of notifications covering a wide range of topics across a wide range of contexts is setting it up to fail. It does work OK when summarizing one or two notifications, or when summarizing straightforward texts or emails from a single person. But for anything else, be prepared for hit-or-miss accuracy and usefulness.

Relocated volume and brightness indicators

The pop-ups you see when adjusting the system volume or screen brightness have been redesigned and moved. The indicators used to appear as large rounded squares, centered on the lower half of your primary display. The design had changed over the years, but this was where they’ve appeared throughout the 25-year existence of Mac OS X.

Now, both indicators appear in the upper-right corner of the screen, glassy rectangles that pop out from items on the menu bar. They’ll usually appear next to the Control Center menu bar item, but the volume indicator will pop out of the Sound icon if it’s visible.

New low battery alert

Tahoe picks up an iPhone-ish low-battery alert on laptops. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Tahoe tweaks the design of macOS’ low battery alert notification. A little circle-shaped meter (in the same style as battery meters in Apple’s Batteries widgets) shows you in bright red just how close your battery is to being drained.

This notification still shows up separately from others and can’t be dismissed, though it doesn’t need to be cleared and will go away on its own. It starts firing off when your laptop’s battery hits 10 percent and continues to go off when you drop another percentage point from there (it also notified me without the percentage readout changing, seemingly at random, as if to annoy me badly enough to plug my computer in more quickly).

The notification frequency and the notification thresholds can’t be changed, if this isn’t something you want to be reminded about or if it’s something you want to be reminded about even earlier. But you could possibly use the battery level trigger in Shortcuts to customize your Mac’s behavior a bit.

Recovery mode changes

A new automated recovery tool in macOS Tahoe’s recovery volume. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Tahoe’s version of the macOS Recovery mode gets a new look to match the rest of the OS, but there are a few other things going on, too.

If you’ve ever had a problem getting your Mac to boot, or if you’ve ever just wanted to do a totally fresh install of the operating system, you may have run into the Mac’s built-in recovery environment before. On an Apple Silicon Mac, you can usually access it by pressing and holding the power button when you start up your Mac and clicking the Options button to start up using the hidden recovery volume rather than the main operating system volume.

Tahoe adds a new tool called the Device Recovery Assistant to the recovery environment, accessible from the Utilities menu. This automated tool “will look for any problems” with your system volume “and attempt to resolve them if found.”

Maybe the Recovery Assistant will actually solve your boot problems, and maybe it won’t—it doesn’t tell you much about what it’s doing, beyond needing to unlock FileVault on my system volume to check it out. But it’s one more thing to try if you’re having serious problems with your Mac and you’re not ready to countenance a clean install yet.

The web browser in the recovery environment is still WebKit, but it’s not Safari-branded anymore, and it sheds a lot of Safari features you wouldn’t want or need in a temporary OS. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple has made a couple of other tweaks to the recovery environment, beyond adding a Liquid Glass aesthetic. The recovery environment’s built-in web browser is simply called Web Browser, and while it’s still based on the same WebKit engine as Safari, it doesn’t have Safari’s branding or its settings (or other features that are extraneous to a temporary recovery environment, like a bookmarks menu). The Terminal window picks up the new Clear theme, new SF Mono Terminal typeface, and the new default 120-row-by-30-column size.

A new disk image format

Not all Mac users interact with disk images regularly, aside from opening them up periodically to install an app or restore an old backup. But among other things, disk images are used by Apple’s Virtualization framework, which makes it relatively simple to run macOS and Linux virtual machines on the platform for testing and other things. But the RAW disk image format used by older macOS versions can come with quite severe performance penalties, even with today’s powerful chips and fast PCI Express-connected SSDs.

Enter the Apple Sparse Image Format, or ASIF. Apple’s developer documentation says that because ASIF images’ “intrinsic structure doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities,” they “transfer more efficiently between hosts or disks.” The upshot is that reading files from and writing files to these images should be a bit closer to your SSD’s native performance (Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company has some testing that suggests significant performance improvements in many cases, though it’s hard to make one-to-one comparisons because testing of the older image formats was done on older hardware).

The upshot is that disk images should be capable of better performance in Tahoe, which will especially benefit virtual machines that rely on disk images. This could benefit the lightweight virtualization apps like VirtualBuddy and Viable that mostly exist to provide a front end for the Virtualization framework, as well as virtualization apps like Parallels that offer support for Windows.

Quantum-safe encryption support

You don’t have a quantum computer on your desk. No one does, outside of labs where this kind of technology is being tested. But when or if they become more widely used, they’ll render many industry-standard forms of encryption relatively easy to break.

macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica Review Read More »

The MacBook Air is the obvious loser as the sun sets on the Intel Mac era

Apple, Apple silicon, Features, Intel Macs, macos 26, macos 26 tahoe, macos tahoe, Tech / Kris Guyer / June 17, 2025

In the end, Intel Macs have mostly gotten a better deal than PowerPC Macs did.

For the last three years, we’ve engaged in some in-depth data analysis and tea-leaf reading to answer two questions about Apple’s support for older Macs that still use Intel chips.

First, was Apple providing fewer updates and fewer years of software support to Macs based on Intel chips as it worked to transition the entire lineup to its internally developed Apple Silicon? And second, how long could Intel Mac owners reasonably expect to keep getting updates?

The answer to the first question has always been “it depends, but generally yes.” And this year, we have a definitive answer to the second question: For the bare handful of Intel Macs it supports, macOS 26 Tahoe will be the final new version of the operating system to support any of Intel’s chips.

To its credit, Apple has also clearly spelled this out ahead of time rather than pulling the plug on Intel Macs with no notice. The company has also said that it plans to provide security updates for those Macs for two years after Tahoe is replaced by macOS 27 next year. These Macs aren’t getting special treatment—this has been Apple’s unspoken, unwritten policy for macOS security updates for decades now—but to look past its usual “we don’t comment on our future plans” stance to give people a couple years of predictability is something we’ve been pushing Apple to do for a long time.

With none of the tea leaf reading left to do, we can now present a fairly definitive look at how Apple has handled the entire Intel transition, compare it to how the PowerPC-to-Intel switch went two decades ago, and predict what it might mean about support for Apple Silicon Macs.

The data

We’ve assembled an epoch-spanning spreadsheet of every PowerPC or Intel Mac Apple has released since the original iMac kicked off the modern era of Apple back in 1998. On that list, we’ve recorded the introduction date for each Mac, the discontinuation date (when it was either replaced or taken off the market), the version of macOS it shipped with, and the final version of macOS it officially supported.

For those macOS versions, we’ve recorded the dates they received their last major point update—these are the feature-adding updates these releases get when they’re Apple’s latest and greatest version of macOS, as macOS 15 Sequoia is right now. After replacing them, Apple releases security-only patches and Safari browser updates for old macOS versions for another two years after replacing them, so we’ve also recorded the dates that those Macs would have received their final security update. For Intel Macs that are still receiving updates (versions 13, 14, and 15) and macOS 26 Tahoe, we’ve extrapolated end-of-support dates based on Apple’s past practices.

A 27-inch iMac model. It’s still the only Intel Mac without a true Apple Silicon replacement. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

We’re primarily focusing on two time spans: from the date of each Mac’s introduction to the date it stopped receiving major macOS updates, and from the date of each Mac’s introduction to the date it stopped receiving any updates at all. We consider any Macs inside either of these spans to be actively supported; Macs that are no longer receiving regular updates from Apple will gradually become less secure and less compatible with modern apps as time passes. We measure by years of support rather than number of releases, which controls for Apple’s transition to a once-yearly release schedule for macOS back in the early 2010s.

We’ve also tracked the time between each Mac model’s discontinuation and when it stopped receiving updates. This is how Apple determines which products go on its “vintage” and “obsolete” hardware lists, which determine the level of hardware support and the kinds of repairs that the company will provide.

We have lots of detailed charts, but here are some highlights:

For all Mac models tracked, the average Mac receives about 6.6 years of macOS updates that add new features, plus another two years of security-only updates.
If you only count the Intel era, the average is around seven years of macOS updates, plus two years of security-only patches.
Most (though not all) Macs released since 2016 come in lower than either of these averages, indicating that Apple has been less generous to most Intel Macs since the Apple Silicon transition began.
The three longest-lived Macs are still the mid-2007 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, the mid-2010 Mac Pro, and the mid-2007 iMac, which received new macOS updates for around nine years after their introduction (and security updates for around 11 years).
The shortest-lived Mac is still the late-2008 version of the white MacBook, which received only 2.7 years of new macOS updates and another 3.3 years of security updates from the time it was introduced. (Late PowerPC-era and early Intel-era Macs are all pretty bad by modern standards.)

The charts

If you bought a Mac any time between 2016 and 2020, you’re generally settling for fewer years of software updates than you would have gotten in the recent past. If you bought a Mac released in 2020, the tail end of the Intel era when Apple Silicon Macs were around the corner, your reward is the shortest software support window since 2006.

There are outliers in either direction. The sole iMac Pro, introduced in 2017 as Apple tried to regain some of its lost credibility with professional users, will end up with 7.75 years of updates plus another two years of security updates when all is said and done. Buyers of 2018–2020 MacBook Airs and the two-port version of the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro, however, are treated pretty poorly, getting not quite 5.5 years of updates (plus two years of security patches) on average from the date they were introduced.

That said, most Macs usually end up getting a little over six years of macOS updates and two more years of security updates. If that’s a year or two lower than the recent past, it’s also not ridiculously far from the historical average.

If there’s something to praise here, it’s interesting that Apple doesn’t seem to treat any of its Macs differently based on how much they cost. Now that we have a complete overview of the Intel era, breaking out the support timelines by model rather than by model year shows that a Mac mini doesn’t get dramatically more or less support than an iMac or a Mac Pro, despite costing a fraction of the price. A MacBook Air doesn’t receive significantly more or less support than a MacBook Pro.

These are just averages, and some models are lucky while others are not. The no-adjective MacBook that Apple has sold on and off since 2006 is also an outlier, with fewer years of support on average than the other Macs.

If there’s one overarching takeaway, it’s that you should buy new Macs as close to the date of their introduction as possible if you want to maximize your software support window. Especially for Macs that were sold continuously for years and years—the 2013 and 2019 Mac Pro, the 2018 Mac mini, the non-Retina 2015 MacBook Air that Apple sold some version of for over four years—buying them toward the end of their retail lifecycle means settling for years of fewer updates than you would have gotten if you had waited for the introduction of a new model. And that’s true even though Apple’s hardware support timelines are all calculated from the date of last availability rather than the date of introduction.

It just puts Mac buyers in a bad spot when Apple isn’t prompt with hardware updates, forcing people to either buy something that doesn’t fully suit their needs or settle for something older that will last for fewer years.

What should you do with an older Intel Mac?

The big question: If your Intel Mac is still functional but Apple is no longer supporting it, is there anything you can do to keep it both secure and functional?

All late-model Intel Macs officially support Windows 10, but that OS has its own end-of-support date looming in October 2025. Windows 11 can be installed, but only if you bypass its system requirements, which can work well, but it does require additional fiddling when it comes time to install major updates. Consumer-focused Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, or Pop!_OS may work, depending on your hardware, but they come with a steep learning curve for non-technical users. Google’s ChromeOS Flex may also work, but ChromeOS is more functionally limited than most other operating systems.

The OpenCore Legacy Patcher provides one possible stay of execution for Mac owners who want to stay on macOS for as long as they can. But it faces two steep uphill climbs in macOS Tahoe. First, as Apple has removed more Intel Macs from the official support list, it has removed more of the underlying code from macOS that is needed to support those Macs and other Macs with similar hardware. This leaves more for the OpenCore Configurator team to have to patch in from older OSes, and this kind of forward-porting can leave hardware and software partly functional or non-functional.

Second, there’s the Apple T2 to consider. The Macs with a T2 treat it as a load-bearing co-processor, responsible for crucial operating system functions such as enabling Touch ID, serving as an SSD controller, encoding and decoding videos, communicating with the webcam and built-in microphone, and other operations. But Apple has never opened the T2 up to anyone, and it remains a bit of a black box for both the OpenCore/Hackintosh community and folks who would run Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu or ChromeOS on that hardware.

The result is that the 2018 and 2019 MacBook Airs that didn’t support macOS 15 Sequoia last year never had support for them added to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher because the T2 chip simply won’t communicate with OpenCore firmware booted. Some T2 Macs don’t have this problem. But if yours does, it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to do anything about it, and your software support will end when Apple says it does.

Does any of this mean anything for Apple Silicon Mac support?

Late-model Intel MacBook Airs have fared worse than other Macs in terms of update longevity. Credit: Valentina Palladino

It will likely be at least two or three years before we know for sure how Apple plans to treat Apple Silicon Macs. Will the company primarily look at specs and technical capabilities, as it did from the late-’90s through to the mid-2010s? Or will Apple mainly stop supporting hardware based on its age, as it has done for more recent Macs and most current iPhones and iPads?

The three models to examine for this purpose are the first ones to shift to Apple Silicon: the M1 versions of the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and 13-inch MacBook Pro, all launched in late 2020. If these Macs are dropped in, say, 2027 or 2028’s big macOS release, but other, later M1 Macs like the iMac stay supported, it means Apple is likely sticking to a somewhat arbitrary age-based model, with certain Macs cut off from software updates that they are perfectly capable of running.

But it’s our hope that all Apple Silicon Macs have a long life ahead of them. The M2, M3, and M4 have all improved on the M1’s performance and other capabilities, but the M1 Macs are much more capable than the Intel ones they supplanted, the M1 was used so widely in various Mac models for so long, and Mac owners can pay so much more for their devices than iPhone and iPad owners. We’d love to see macOS return to the longer-tail software support it provided in the late-’00s and mid-2010s, when models could expect to see seven or eight all-new macOS versions and another two years of security updates afterward.

All signs point to Apple using the launch date of any given piece of hardware as the determining factor for continued software support. But that isn’t how it has always been, nor is it how it always has to be.

The MacBook Air is the obvious loser as the sun sets on the Intel Mac era Read More »

Apple details the end of Intel Mac support and a phaseout for Rosetta 2

Apple, Apple silicon, Macs, Rosetta, Rosetta 2, Tech / Kris Guyer / June 10, 2025

The support list for macOS Tahoe still includes Intel Macs, but it has been whittled down to just four models, all released in 2019 or 2020. We speculated that this meant that the end was near for Intel Macs, and now we can confirm just how near it is: macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will require an Apple Silicon Mac.

Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27. That’s a typical schedule for older macOS versions, which all get one year of major point updates that include security fixes and new features, followed by two years of security-only updates to keep them patched but without adding significant new features.

Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel-to-Arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.

But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers. Devs who want their apps to continue running on macOS after that will need to transition to either Apple Silicon-native apps or universal apps that run on either architecture.

Apple details the end of Intel Mac support and a phaseout for Rosetta 2 Read More »

Asahi Linux lead resigns from Mac-based distro after tumultuous kernel debate

Apple silicon, asahi linux, hector martin, Linus Torvalds, Linux, Linux kernel, linux kernel mailing list, rust, rust for linux, Tech / Rejus Almole / February 14, 2025

Working at the intersection of Apple’s newest hardware and Linux kernel development, for the benefit of a free distribution, was never going to be easy. But it’s been an especially hard couple of weeks for Hector Martin, project lead for Asahi Linux, capping off years of what he describes as burnout, user entitlement, and political battles within the Linux kernel community about Rust code.

In a post on his site, “Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead,” Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking projects, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated games. Martin shifted his focus, and when Apple unveiled its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin writes, “I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project.” This time, there was no jailbreaking and a relatively open, if tricky, platform.

Support and donations came quickly. The first two years saw rapid advancement of a platform built “from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation.” Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, across “practically every Linux subsystem,” was an “incredibly frustrating experience” (emphasis Martin’s).

Then came the users demanding to know when Thunderbolt, monitors over USB-C, M3/M4 support, and even CPU temperature checking would appear. Donations and pledges slowly decreased while demands increased. “It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had,” Martin writes.

Martin cites personal complications, along with stalking and harassment, as slowing down work through 2024, while Vulkan drivers and an emulation stack still shipped. Simultaneously, issues with pushing Rust code into the Linux kernel were brewing. Rust was “the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did,” Martin writes. Citing the Nova driver for Nvidia GPUs as an example, Martin writes that “More modern programming languages are better suited to writing drivers for more modern hardware with more complexity and novel challenges, unsurprisingly.”

Asahi Linux lead resigns from Mac-based distro after tumultuous kernel debate Read More »

Join us tomorrow for Ars Live: How Asahi Linux ports open software to Apple’s hardware

Apple, Apple M1, Apple M2, Apple M3, apple m4, Apple silicon, arm linux, asahi linux, Fedora, Linux, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 3, 2024

One of the key differences between Apple’s Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel’s chips to Apple’s own silicon.

The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn’t work natively with Apple’s hardware, not least because of missing drivers for basic things like USB ports, GPUs, and power management. Enter the Asahi Linux project, a community-driven effort to make open-source software run on Apple’s hardware.

In just a few years, the team has taken Linux on Apple Silicon from “basically bootable” to “plays native Windows games and sounds great doing it.” And the team’s ultimate goal is to contribute enough code upstream that you no longer need a Linux distribution just for Apple Silicon Macs.

On December 4 at 3: 30 pm Eastern (1: 30 pm Pacific), Ars Technica Senior Technology Reporter Andrew Cunningham will host a livestreamed YouTube conversation with Asahi Linux Project Lead Hector Martin and Graphics Lead Alyssa Rosenzweig that will cover the project’s genesis and its progress, as well as what the future holds.

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Join us tomorrow for Ars Live: How Asahi Linux ports open software to Apple’s hardware Read More »

Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one

Apple, apple m4, Apple silicon, m4, m4 max, m4 pro, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Reviews, Tech / Rejus Almole / November 12, 2024

Not a surprising generational update, but a lot of progress for just one year.

The new M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In some ways, my review of the new MacBook Pros will be a lot like my review of the new iMac. This is the third year and fourth generation of the Apple Silicon-era MacBook Pro design, and outwardly, few things have changed about the new M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max laptops.

Here are the things that are different. Boosted RAM capacities, across the entire lineup but most crucially in the entry-level $1,599 M4 MacBook Pro, make the new laptops a shade cheaper and more versatile than they used to be. The new nano-texture display option, a $150 upgrade on all models, is a lovely matte-textured coating that completely eliminates reflections. There’s a third Thunderbolt port on the baseline M4 model (the M3 model had two), and it can drive up to three displays simultaneously (two external, plus the built-in screen). There’s a new webcam. It looks a little nicer and has a wide-angle lens that can show what’s on your desk instead of your face if you want it to. And there are new chips, which we’ll get to.

That is essentially the end of the list. If you are still using an Intel-era MacBook Pro, I’ll point you to our previous reviews, which mostly celebrate the improvements (more and different kids of ports, larger screens) while picking one or two nits (they are a bit larger and heavier than late-Intel MacBook Pros, and the display notch is an eyesore).

New chips: M4 and M4 Pro

That leaves us with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max.

We’ve already talked a bunch about the M4 and M4 Pro in our reviews of the new iMac and the new Mac minis, but to recap, the M4 is a solid generational upgrade over the M3, thanks to its two extra efficiency cores on the CPU side. Comparatively, the M4 Pro is a much larger leap over the M3 Pro, mostly because the M3 Pro was such a mild update compared to the M2 Pro.

The M4’s single-core performance is between 14 and 21 percent faster than the M3s in our tests, and tests that use all the CPU cores are usually 20 or 30 percent faster. The GPU is occasionally as much as 33 percent faster than the M3 in our tests, though more often, the improvements are in the single or low double digits.

For the M4 Pro—bearing in mind that we tested the fully enabled version with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, and not the slightly cut down version sold in less expensive machines—single-core CPU performance is up by around 20-ish percent in our tests, in line with the regular M4’s performance advantage over the regular M3. The huge boost to CPU core count increases multicore performance by between 50 and 60 percent most of the time, a substantial boost that actually allows the M4 Pro to approach the CPU performance of the 2022 M1 Ultra. GPU performance is up by around 33 percent compared to M3 Pro, thanks to the additional GPU cores and memory bandwidth, but it’s still not as fast as any of Apple’s Max or Ultra chips, even the M1-series.

M4 Max

And finally, there’s the M4 Max (again, the fully enabled version, this one with 12 P-cores, 4 E-cores, 40 GPU cores, and 546GB/s of memory bandwidth). Single-core CPU performance is the biggest leap forward, jumping by between 18 and 28 percent in single-threaded benchmarks. Multi-core performance is generally up by between 15 and 20 percent. That’s a more-than-respectable generational leap, but it’s nowhere near what happened for the M4 Pro since both M3 Mac and M4 Max have the same CPU core counts.

The only weird thing we noticed in our testing was an inconsistent performance in our Handbrake video encoding test. Every time we ran it, it reliably took either five minutes and 20 seconds or four minutes and 30 seconds. For the slower result, power usage was also slightly reduced, which suggests to me that some kind of throttling is happening during this workload; we saw roughly these two results over and over across a dozen or so runs, each separated by at least five minutes to allow the Mac to cool back down. High Power mode didn’t make a difference in either direction.

	CPU P/E-cores	GPU cores	RAM options	Display support (including internal)	Memory bandwidth
Apple M4 Max (low)	10/4	32	36GB	Up to five	410GB/s
Apple M4 Max (high)	12/4	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	546GB/s
Apple M3 Max (high)	12/4	40	48/64/128GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s
Apple M2 Max (high)	8/4	38	64/96GB	Up to five	409.6GB/s

We shared our data with Apple and haven’t received a response. Note that we tested the M4 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and we’d expect any kind of throttling behavior to be slightly more noticeable in the 14-inch Pro since it has less room for cooling hardware.

The faster result is more in line with the rest of our multi-core tests for the M4 Max. Even the slower of the two results is faster than the M3 Max, albeit not by much. We also didn’t notice similar behavior for any of the other multi-core tests we ran. It’s worth keeping in mind if you plan to use the MacBook Pro for CPU-heavy, sustained workloads that will run for more than a few minutes at a time.

GPU performance in our tests varies widely compared to the M4 Max, with results ranging from as little as 10 or 15 percent (for 4K and 1440p GFXBench tests—the bigger boost to the 1080p version is coming partially from CPU improvements) to as high as 30 percent for the Cinebench 2024 GPU test. I suspect the benefits will vary depending on how much the apps you’re running benefit from the M4 Max’s improved memory bandwidth.

Power efficiency in the M4 Max isn’t dramatically different from the M3 Max—it’s more efficient by virtue of using roughly the same amount of power as the M3 Max and running a little faster, consuming less energy overall to do the same amount of work.

Finally, in a test of High Power mode, we did see some very small differences in the GFXBench scores, though not in other GPU-based tests like Cinebench and Blender or in any CPU-based tests. You might notice slightly better performance in games if you’re running them, but as with the M4 Pro, it doesn’t seem hugely beneficial. This is different from how it’s handled in many Windows PCs, including Snapdragon X Elite PCs with Arm-based chips in them because they do have substantially different performance in high-performance mode relative to the default “balanced” mode.

Nice to see you, yearly upgrade

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. The nano-texture glass displays eliminate all of the normal glossy-screen reflections and glare. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new MacBook Pros are all solid year-over-year upgrades, though they’ll be most interesting to people who bought their last MacBook Pro toward the end of the Intel era sometime in 2019 or 2020. The nano-texture display, extra speed, and extra RAM may be worth a look for owners of the M1 MacBook Pros if you truly need the best performance you can get in a laptop. But I’d still draw a pretty bright line between latter-day Intel Macs (aging, hot, getting toward the end of the line for macOS updates, not getting all the features of current macOS versions anyway) and any kind of Apple Silicon Mac (fully supported with all features, still-current designs, barely three years old at most).

Frankly, the computer that benefits the most is probably the $1,599 entry-level MacBook Pro, which, thanks to the 16GB RAM upgrade and improved multi-monitor support, is a fairly capable professional computer. Of all the places where Apple’s previous 8GB RAM floor felt inappropriate, it was in the M3 MacBook Pro. With the extra ports, high-refresh-rate screen, and nano-texture coating option, it’s a bit easier to articulate the kind of user who that laptop is actually for, separating it a bit from the 15-inch MacBook Air.

The M4 Pro version also deserves a shout-out for its particularly big performance jump compared to the M2 Pro and M3 Pro generations. It’s a little odd to have a MacBook Pro generation where the middle chip is the most impressive of the three, and that’s not to discount how fast the M4 Max is—it’s just the reality of the situation given Apple’s focus on efficiency rather than performance for the M3 Pro.

The good

RAM upgrades across the whole lineup. This particularly benefits the $1,599 M4 MacBook Air, which jumps from 8GB to 16GB
M4 and M4 Max are both respectable generational upgrades and offer substantial performance boosts from Intel or even M1 Macs
M4 Pro is a huge generational leap, as Apple’s M3 Pro used a more conservative design
Nano-texture display coating is very nice and not too expensive relative to the price of the laptops
Better multi-monitor support for M4 version
Other design things—ports, 120 Hz screen, keyboard, and trackpad—are all mostly the same as before and are all very nice

The bad

Occasional evidence of M4 Max performance throttling, though it’s inconsistent, and we only saw it in one of our benchmarks
Need to jump all the way to M4 Max to get the best GPU performance

The ugly

Expensive, especially once you start considering RAM and storage upgrades

Review: The fastest of the M4 MacBook Pros might be the least interesting one Read More »