M5: New Apple Silicon chip soon in Mac and iPad
According to a report, the first models with Apple's new SoC will soon be released. It remains to be seen whether the iPad Pro will be given priority.
Apple M5: This year, but when?
(Image: Mac & i)
Apple is about to release new Macs and iPads with M5 processors. Mark Gurman from the financial news agency Bloomberg believes this to be the case. In his weekend newsletter, he writes that the iPad Pro with the new chip is "in advanced testing ahead of a launch this year". The internal code names are therefore J817, J818, J820 and J821. At the same time, Apple is also working on the first Mac series with an M5 chip, which will be the MacBook Pro.
iPad Pro M5 in the second half of the year?
It remains unclear whether the iPad Pro will also be the first device with the latest SoC this year. It was released in 2024 with M4 in May – including OLED display and thinner housing. However, Gurman now writes that the iPad Pro is ready for production in the second half of 2025 – and could therefore be released in September or October. The iPad Pro will be "one of the first devices" with the new M5 chip – whether it will be the first remains unclear.
The M5 promises some internal improvements in performance and energy consumption. It is still said to be a 3 nm process from TSMC, which is optimized by so-called 3D chip stacking. Compared to the M4 (N3E), the N3P manufacturing process promises clock speed increases of 5 percent. Major improvements are to be expected in the Pro and Max models in particular, which are said to stack several chips on top of each other for the first time with TSMC's "System on Integrated Chips" (SoIC) kit: from cache or DRAM chips on one processor to CPU and GPU dies stacked on top of each other.
OLED MacBook Pro not coming until 2026
The MacBook Pro M4 in the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max variants is expected in the fall. Apart from the new processor, the hardware will hardly be changed. An OLED display and a new form factor are currently not expected before 2026, even though many professionals have been waiting for this for some time and had hoped for a faster timeline after the iPad Pro M4 became available.
Meanwhile, according to Gurman, Apple is already working on other M5 models, including a MacBook Air – even though it has only just received the M4. The iPad Pro with the next but one chip, the M6, will in turn be equipped with an Apple modem for the first time next year. Work has also begun on an iPad 12.
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