Copyright gqindia
Sure, AI might be good for recontextualising 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 M5? 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, organise work notes intelligently or do more complex work like generative modelling 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 M5 is Apple’s attempt to get its laptops ahead of the AI curve in one generational leap. Still a killer laptop Why is Apple pushing so hard on AI with its latest MacBook Pro? Mainly because it’s the new frontier in tech right now, but also because its current laptop line-up was already elite to begin with. Arguably, it’s a little too elite for some of the people who would have bought a Pro in the past, given that the thinner, more lightweight MacBook Air is now a dab hand at the kind of video and photo editing that was formerly the entry-level 14-inch Pro’s calling card. If you don’t need a heavyweight laptop with the oomph to handle up to four streams of 8K ProRes video simultaneously, then the new Pro’s AI capabilities provide another incentive to shell out the best part of two grand on a new laptop. As does the sheer build quality Apple has more or less perfected over the past decade. Although there’s no getting around the (still relatively compact) 14-inch Pro’s 1.55kg heft compared to its slimline alternative, that added weight is put to efficient use. Most notably, the Pro’s 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR mini‑LED display is one of the finest you’ll find on a laptop, offering pin-sharp resolutions when you’re spluttering out text to a deadline and unparalleled colour accuracy and contrast, whether you’re catching up on Slow Horses or piecing together your own video edits. On top of this and the inclusion of faster SSD storage, you also get up to 24 hours of battery life, a six-speaker sound system that absolutely slaps, my favourite keyboard to work with and all the ports you could possibly hope for (including HDMI, three Thunderbolt ports and a SDXC card slot). Naturally, Apple will soon make a new 16-inch MacBook Pro with an even superior M5 Pro or Max chip – as well as a few choice hardware tweaks – but in the meantime, this 14-inch model ticks all the boxes for a creative laptop. While this MacBook's AI accomplishments don’t quite reinvent the “Pro” concept, they do at least broaden its palette. There’s a genuine sense that you can do more with this machine, as opposed to the same but better. Is the MacBook Pro 14-inch worth it? Having reinvigorated the MacBook Pro over the past half-decade, Apple could have easily gone into “no worlds left to conquer” mode and spun its wheels while waiting for its competitors to catch up. Instead, the M5 chip and its AI capabilities have brought a new sense of purpose to the Mac. At least for the meantime, while half the global economy works to figure out just how useful this tech can be. The most iconic laptop for innovators just got all the more capable. Not bad going for a spec bump. Apple's MacBook Pro (14-inch) is available now for Rs 2,09,900 at apple.com Via gq-magazine.co.uk
