Apple M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros Announced: Super Cores, New Architecture, and New External Monitors

Apple announced M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro configurations alongside its first new external displays in years, as part of the March 2026 Mac refresh that also includes the MacBook Neo and updated MacBook Airs. The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips introduce a significant architectural departure from earlier Apple Silicon by adding a third CPU core tier — super cores at the top, performance cores in the middle, and efficiency cores at the bottom — alongside a new neural engine and substantially higher memory bandwidth. These chips target developers, ML engineers, and media professionals who depend on Apple's unified-memory architecture for sustained compute-intensive workloads.

Key Takeaways

• M5 Pro: 12-core CPU (4 super + 4 performance + 4 efficiency), 24-core GPU, starts at $1,999 (24GB RAM); M5 Max: 16-core CPU (4 super + 8 performance + 4 efficiency), 40-core GPU, starts at $3,499 (48GB RAM)\n· Architectural departure from M4 two-tier CPU design: new three-tier core hierarchy; macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 retroactively renamed M5 base 'performance' cores to 'super' to align with the new M5 Pro/Max naming\n· Apple also announced new external monitors alongside the MacBook Pro refresh — first new displays in years; full review of M5 Pro/Max performance expected from Ars Technica shortly

Original source: Ars Technica