Sure, AI might be good for recontextualizing Sam Altman’s face in Sora 2, getting into a situationship with a chatbot and pumping up Nvidia’s stock price, but the great promise of this new technology is that it’s meant to make work easier. If you want to discern Elon Musk’s latest political leanings via Grok, be my guest, but some of us are just trying to grind through our 9-to-5 out here. What does all of this have to do with Apple’s new 14-inch MacBook Pro? Well, it’s the tech maker’s first laptop to be upgraded for the AI era via its latest M5 chip.
As accomplished as the MacBook Pro has become in recent years, these spec bumps aren’t usually much to write home about. After all, this is more or less the same laptop as 2024’s already imperious Pro, only with a new chip to freshen things up. In a rare exception to the rule, the M5’s claimed leap in Large Language Model-related performance is the kind of step up that’ll actually have an impact on how you use your Mac. Truth be told, this might be Apple’s most significant laptop in a good few years.
Made for On-Device AI, Not Just ChatGPT
OK, so it’s probably worth taking a beat to discern what kind of AI the M5-powered MacBook Pros have been created for. It’s not Apple Intelligence, the company’s still-in-progress attempt to integrate the best of AI (EG writing tools, generative imagery and a smarter Siri) across its operating systems. It’s not even really ChatGPT, Gemini, or any LLM that’ll take your requests for good or slop and churn it out via a cloud computing server. No, what we’re talking about here is on-device AI through an app like BoltAI, a custom GPT, or other more creative services.
What’s the benefit? Well, this means you can automate your accounting, organize work notes intelligently or do more complex work like generative modeling with only your MacBook Pro to hand rather than paying for extra computing on a server somewhere to do the work. Now, if you’re the kind of person who thinks a token is something you accumulate at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach bingo hall, then none of this is going to make a difference to your day-to-day. If, like me, AI is increasingly becoming a part of your workflow, then the M5’s claimed performance boost is significant. Compared to the just 17-month old M4-powered MacBook Pro, AI workloads are accelerated up to 3.5x. And as for 2020’s M1-powered Pro? There’s a substantial 6x performance boost.
This is a big deal right now for a certain calibre of developer or designer. If you don’t care to understand why integrating a “Neural Accelerator” into each GPU core of this chip’s 16-core “Neural Engine” is significant, just know it’ll make your work easier in the long run. To put things a different way, the new MacBook Pro is Apple’s attempt to get its laptops ahead of the AI curve in one generational leap.
