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

On Tuesday evening Beijing time, Apple announced updates to the MacBook lineup during its second spring product launch, featuring the new M5 chip in the MacBook Air and the all-new M5 Pro/M5 Max chips in the MacBook Pro.

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

Apple stated that the M5 version of the MacBook Air doubles the starting storage to 512GB and offers a maximum of 4TB storage for the first time, with the new SSD read/write speeds doubling compared to 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 expensive 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 expensive 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 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 pricing 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 upgrading to 128GB adds $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 use 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 joined together. But in the M5 era, Apple 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, also over four times the AI computing power of the previous generation. This new architecture means that if you want a high-end GPU, the only option is the M5 Max.

(Source: Cailian Press)