All of Apples Announcements This Week
This week has been a big update to a large portion of apples hardware. They started the week on Monday announcing the iPhone 17e and the M4 iPad air.
The iPhone 17e is a solid but albeit boring update from the 16e to keep the low end refreshed for more savvy buyers as well as for enterprise purchasers.
The upgrades feature an A19 Chip and C1X modem previously debut in the iPhone Air as well as a doubling of the base storage from 128GB to 256GB which is nice to see. Finally on the upgrades they did add magsafe, something that was critisied from being missing on the 16e, and last of all they added a new "soft pink" colour overall this was a nice update. The cherry on top, its the same price as the 16e was last year.
iPhone 17e
Next up was the iPad air, this one was a little bit more of a internal upgrade, only seeing a update from the M3 to the M4 chip, and a slight increase in ram from 8gb to 12GB but base storage still remains at 128GB sadly. The M4 also gets an upgrade to the N1 Wi-Fi, BT and thread chip that the iPhone 17 lineup saw in September, as well as the C1X modem for cellular models. Again no price increase here is refreshing in these trying times.
M4 iPad Air
Finally for Monday the most mundain of them all Apple Studio and Apple Studio XDR Monitors, These monitors are still largly lagging behind the rest of the industry in terms of panel technology and are also incredibly expensive. Seriously go buy a QD Oled monitor instead!
Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
Tuesday brought us a whole lot of Macs, First of all is the M5 Macbook Air, This one again is a fairly straight forward upgrade, M5 chip and N1 for networking the same 16GB of RAM as the M4 MBA and finally another doubling of base storage to 512GB meaning for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, the base model Macbook Air is now a flatout recommendation for its price category no caveats needed, The one slight downside is it did see a $100/£100 increase. But I think its still a cracking machine for its price and looking at the trends for previous base model Macbook Airs, it wont be a surprise to see these at Black Friday for £750-£800 which is an absolute steal.
M5 Macbook Air
Then we got the Macbook Pros with the New M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, heres where things get a little complicated, In every M chip until M5 we have only seen two types of CPU cores, Performance Cores or P Cores and Efficiency Cores or E Cores, With the New M5 Pro and Max though this all changes with the introduction of the Super Core or S Core, M5 Pro and Max throw the E Cores out the window so now the MacBook Pro comes in the following configurations.
| Chip | E Cores | P Cores | S Cores | GPU Cores |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M5 (14 inch only) | 6 | 0 | 4 | 20 |
| M5 Pro | 0 | 10 | 5 | 20 |
| M5 Pro | 0 | 12 | 6 | 20 |
| M5 Max | 0 | 12 | 6 | 32 |
| M5 Max (16 inch only) | 0 | 12 | 6 | 40 |
This is a benefit of them moving to a chaplet design is now cores can be mixed and matched at will. I wouldn't be surprised if the rumored M5 Ultra set to be announced around WWDC features a blend of all three Chips perhaps 12 S Cores, 12 P Cores and 6 E Cores or even a future M6 Chip seeing 2 S Cores, 4 P Cores and 6 E Cores for Example.
Back to the Macbook Pros though, other improvements are inclusion of the N1 Wi-Fi and BT chip as well as a doubling of base storage to 1TB which is another nice thing to see.
M5 Pro MacBook Pro
Last Edited: 1 month ago.