M5: New Apple-Silicon chip soon in Mac and iPad

Apple is about to release new Macs and iPads with M5 processor. Of it goes Mark Gurman from the financial news agency Bloomberg out of. In his newsletter from the weekend, he wrote that the iPad Pro is with the new chip “in advanced tests before a start of sales this year”. The internal code names are J817, J818, J820 and J821. At the same time, Apple is also working on a first Mac series with M5 chip, it should be the MacBook Pro.

iPad Pro M5 in the second half of the year?

It remains unclear whether the iPad Pro will be the first device with the latest SoC this year. In 2024 it was published with M4 in May-including OLED display and thinner housing. Gurman now writes that the iPad Pro is ready for production in the second half of 2025 – accordingly it could be released in September or October. The iPad Pro will “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 should continue to be a 3-nm process from TSMC. which is optimized by so-called 3D chip stacking. The manufacturing process N3P allegedly promises by 5 percent compared to the M4 (N3E). Larger improvements are to be expected in particular for the PRO and MAX models, which with TSMCS “System on Integrated Chips” kit (Soic) allegedly stack several chips for the first time: from cache or dram chips on a processor to one-way CPU and GPU dies.

OLED-MACBOOK PRO will only come in 2026

The MacBook Pro M4 in the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max variants can be expected in autumn. The hardware should hardly have changed except for the new processor. An OLED display and a new shape factor are currently not expected before 2026, even if many professionals have been waiting for it for a long time and, after the iPad Pro M4, had hoped for a faster timeline.

Meanwhile, according to Gurman, Apple is already working on other M5 models, including a MacBook Air-even if it has just received the M4. The iPad Pro with the Chip, the M6 ​​after next, is said to be equipped with an Apple modem for the first time in the coming year. Working on an iPad 12 also started.