MacBook Pro 14" (M5, 2025)

In October 2025, Apple quietly slotted the M5 chip into the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, the least dramatic possible way to introduce what was, under the hood, a genuinely significant architectural shift. The headline addition was a Neural Accelerator built directly into each of the M5's ten GPU cores, a change Apple said delivered up to 3.5x the AI performance of the M4 generation and up to 1.6x faster graphics, aimed squarely at the growing demand for on-device machine learning workloads rather than traditional gaming or rendering benchmarks. Externally nothing changed at all: the same 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, the same three-Thunderbolt-port layout, the same Space Black and Silver finish, and the same $1,599 starting price the entry MacBook Pro had held for several generations running. That restraint was clearly deliberate, positioning this as an internal, chip-focused refresh rather than a redesign, with the bigger visual and structural changes saved for the Pro and Max configurations that would follow a few months later. Reviewers treated the M5 MacBook Pro as a sensible, if unglamorous, upgrade: real gains for anyone running local AI models or Neural Engine-accelerated apps, alongside the usual incremental CPU and GPU improvements, but nothing that would compel an M4 owner to upgrade immediately. Where it mattered most was as a signal of where Apple's silicon roadmap was headed, treating dedicated on-chip AI acceleration as a baseline feature across the entire Mac lineup rather than a differentiator reserved for the priciest configurations.