M5 MacBook Pro No Longer Coming in 2025

If I were to guess, it's likely that sales projections are down right now, and they're hoping by keeping the existing line a bit longer, new buyer numbers will be larger in the spring. Most people don't upgrade every generation and a lot of people are still running M1/M2 devices.

I would also speculate that there may be some growing pains for the n2 production from TSMC, and/or a desire to get there in the AZ fab production before launch to avoid tariffs hitting their bottom line. They'd rather pay 12-20% more for just the CPU than eat large tariffs on the full cost. I don't think they'd be able to significantly raise prices further based on tariffs, like some other companies with smaller margins are forced to do, on order to be competitive.

Really, they could probably get away with selling M4 devices for another couple cycles. As far as performance is concerned, even going back to the M1, the only group feeling inadequacies large enough to make upgrading a “must” are those whose needs sit within spitting distance of cusp of consumer/prosumer computing. Battery life is still industry leading with only a handful of competitors just recently being able to claim similar real world numbers (thanks mostly to Lunar Lake, which isn’t available for many models and comes at the cost of some performance).

I’ve used both M1 Max and M4 Max machines extensively and while the latter is a good deal faster, it’s only really noticeable with longer sustained tasks and particularly large projects. The high-RAM variants of M1 models in particular should continue to be quite servicable for some time to come.

Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my department).

The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.

If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.

I got M1 Max with 64GB and 32 core GPU fro $1500 refurbished with zero cycle battery on 100%. As most companies doing refresh/write-off after 3 years 2025 is really a year where you can get a beast of machine for the money. I also have M4 Max for work and differences are only on really heavy tasks but for 3X less money I guess M1 Max is still good deal. This delay also means that M2/M3 ones will be good buy next year as well.

What I’d most like in future MacBooks is the continuation of increases in memory size and bandwidth.

Apple has carved out a niche for itself in the local LLM space, yet it continues to overcharge for RAM and under-deliver in terms of bandwidth.

I have no hopes that Apple will decrease its prices, particularly on top-of-the-line models like those with 128 GB of memory and above.

Yet I certainly believe that it can deliver even more RAM and, in particular, memory bandwidth. Apple clearly offers much more VRAM than consumer NVIDIA GPUs, but Macs are still behind in terms of memory bandwidth and, relatedly, overall performance.

It would be silly of Apple not to jump at the opportunity to eat even more of NVIDIA’s market share among the general public.

Welcome to the world where Tim Cook has to present gold offerings to the US president and spend most of his time navigating massive new taxes on imports the company relies on.

"There's a rumor about certain Apple product and it says that the previous rumor about same product was wrong."

need more gold foil blocks

Good. Hopefully we're going back to more sensible and sustainable 2-3 year cycles.

Apple is in such an interesting position right now. Having made the decision for whatever reason to go with a unified memory architecture, they are now almost unique in terms of being able to offer super power efficient laptops with very large GPU memory. If they were to just double the memory bandwidth and do nothing else they could break away as a preferred way to run especially inference but maybe even training for small LLM models. Given the bottlenecks on availability and pricing of nVidia cards we are already toying with the idea of building a small local LLM stack based on Macs for this reason. If Apple made it more compelling we could easily go from toying with it to seriously considering it.

It's disappointing to hear they are delaying this year's Macbooks because I was really hoping to see some improvements like this specifically targeted at running local LLMs.

I have a 16" M2 Max with 32 GB of RAM and I do pretty much everything on it, and I've yet to have a moment where I thought "ugh I wish this was faster"

I used to upgrade computers every 1-1.5 years but I think I could easily roll with this for another 2-3 maybe even 4 or 5 years more.

Heck, even if I was given free money I'd be too lazy to switch to an M4 Max just because of the hassle of transferring data that isn't on iCloud/Time Machine.

I was waiting for the M5 to have some other substantial changes like in the display or sound etc.

Same problem as their phones. They don't do anything new or interesting year over year. The CPU gets a bit faster, but that's it. They haven't provided a compelling reason to upgrade in a few years