Apple MacBook Pro M5 Is $300 Off—It’s the Rare Deal You’ve Been Waiting For
Apple MacBook Pro M5 Is $300 Off—It’s the Rare Deal You’ve Been Waiting For
https://www.vice.com/en/via/apple-macbook-pro-m5-deal-may-2026/
Publish Date: 2026-05-12 12:31:00
Source Domain: www.vice.com
Nowhere is Apple’s tendency toward word salad in product names more apparent than in the MacBook Pro family of laptops, which sits above the MacBook Air in price and performance. Bear with me, because I’m not merely talking about the MacBook Pro M5.
The MacBook Pro M5 I most heartily and regularly recommend is the MacBook Pro M5 Pro, and it’s on a sale for $1,799, down $300 from its retail price. Apple has only been selling the M5 Pro (and M5 Max) versions of the latest MacBook Pro since March 2026. This is a brand-spanking-new laptop, and of all Apple’s laptops, this is the exact version I highlight as the best deal among all of them.
The chip to get
There are three flavors of MacBook Pro M5, just as there have been for the past several generations. Last year’s Pro M4, the previous year’s Pro M3, and so on. From entry-level to top-end, they go from the regular M5 chip to the M5 Pro chip to the M5 Max chip. That’s how you end up with clunky full product names like MacBook Pro M5 Pro.
The entry-level M5 chip is fine, and thanks to cooling fans in the chassis the baseline MacBook Pro M5 (also on sale right now for $161 off) is a bit more of a stronger performer, although bulkier, compared to the MacBook Air M5 ($150 off at the moment for a cool $949). But the real magic for the MacBook Pro line begins to happen when you step up to the M5 Pro chip, the mid-range model highlighted here.
The M5 Pro chip nearly doubles the memory bandwidth over the M5 chip—307 GB/s to 154 GB/s. That gives it the speed and strength to take on heavier-duty tasks, such as light video editing and more complex AI workloads. The latter’s Thunderbolt 5 ports off a max transfer speed of three times the former’s Thunderbolt 4 ports, its WiFi 7 standard is faster and more reliable than the base-level MacBook Pro M5’s WiFi 6E; that only comes in handy if you’re using a WiFi 7-capable internet router, though.
The MacBook Pro M5 Max ($235 off) is the…
