With smartphone and tablet news already discussed, what else did Apple unveil this week? Read on for all the goodies and their details.

As I teased at the end of my prior piece, computers and displays were also on the plate for Apple’s “big week of news” announcements suite. With today’s (as I write this on Wednesday in the late afternoon) New York, London, and Shanghai “Experience” in-person events now concluded:

(No, alas, I wasn’t invited)

I’m guessing that Apple’s wrapped up its rollouts for now, therefore compelling me to revisit my keyboard for concluding part 2. That said, I realized in retrospect that there was one additional earlier hardware announcement that, had I remembered at the time (and in time), I would have also included in part 1, since it also covered mobile devices. So, let’s start there.

AirTag 2

In late April 2021, Apple introduced its first-generation AirTag trackers, leveraging Bluetooth LE connectivity to mate them with owner-paired smartphones and tablets and more broadly (when a tagged device is lost) the broader Find My crowdsourced network ecosystem to assist in identifying their whereabouts and monitoring their movements. Integrated ultrawideband (UWB) support, when also comprehended by the paired mobile device, affords even more precise location discernment (i.e., not just somewhere in the living room, but having fallen between the sofa cushions). And built-in NFC support assists anyone who might find a tag (and whatever it’s attached to), to notify the person that it belongs to. Here’s my first-gen teardown.

Nearly five years later, and quoting Wikipedia:

An updated model with the U2 chip, upgraded Bluetooth, and a louder speaker was released in January 2026 [editor note: Monday the 26^th, to be precise]. It has enhanced range for precision detection with iPhones equipped with a U2 chip such as the iPhone 15/Pro or later (excluding iPhone 16e), and also allows an Apple Watch with a U2 chip such as the Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later (excluding Apple Watch SE), to precisely locate items.

Now fast-forwarding a month-plus to this week’s announcements…

The M5 Pro and Max SoCs

2.5 years back, within my coverage of Intel’s then leading-edge and first-time chiplet-implemented Meteor Lake CPU architecture:

I noted that the company was, to at least some degree, following in the footsteps of AMD and Apple, both having already productized chiplet-based designs. In AMD’s case, I was on solid footing with my stance, as the company had already been embedding and interconnecting discrete processors, graphics, and other logic circuits for several years. In Apple’s case, conversely, my definition of a chiplet implementation was a bit more loosey-goosey, at least at the time:

Above is a de-lidded photo of Apple’s M1 SoC. At left is the single-die implementation of the entirety of the logic circuitry, plus cache. And on the right are two DRAM memory chips. Admittedly, the “Ultra” variant of the eventual M1 product family, at far right:

upped the ante a bit more, “stitching together two distinct M1 Max die via a silicon interposer”. But I’ve long wondered when Apple would go “full monty” on disaggregation, mixing-and-matching various slivers of logic silicon attached to and interconnected via a shared packaging substrate, to keep each die’s dimensions to a reasonable manufacturing-yield size and to afford fuller implementation flexibility. To wit, the points I made back in September 2023 remain valid:

• Leading-edge processes have become incredibly difficult and costly to develop and ramp into high-volume production,
• That struggle and expense, coupled with the exponentially growing transistor counts on modern ICs, have negatively (and significantly so) impacted large-die manufacturing yields not only during initial semiconductor process ramps but also long-term, and
• Desirable variability both in process technology (DRAM versus logic, for example), process optimization (low power consumption versus high performance) and IC sourcing (internal fab versus foundry), not to mention the attractiveness of being able to rapidly mix-and-match various feature set combinations to address different (and evolving) market needs, also enhance the appeal of a multi- vs monolithic-die IC implementation.

That time is now, branded as the “Fusion Architecture” and ironically foreshadowed by a then-subtle Apple online store tweak a month ago. Quoting from the press release subhead:

M5 Pro and M5 Max are built using the new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture that connects two dies with advanced IP blocks into a single SoC, delivering significant performance increases that push the limits of what’s possible…

In an interesting twist from the past, this time the two product proliferations seemingly share a common processor die, although the variety and number of guaranteed-functional cores varies both between the two devices and within a given device’s binning variants. Conversely, the graphics core counts diverge more substantially between the two devices. To some degree this is reflective of the high-end “Max” device’s professional content creator target demographic, although I’d wager that it more broadly affords more robust on-device deep learning inference capabilities in conjunction with the chips’ presumed-still-existent neural processing cores. And what of an “Ultra” variant of the M5…is it on the way? Maybe…

Tomato, tomahto

Speaking of cores, by the way…sigh. Look back at my M5 SoC (and initial devices based on it) coverage from last October, and you’ll see that, just as with prior generations of both A- and M-based Apple-developed silicon, it contains a mix of both performance (speed- optimized) and efficiency (power consumption-tuned) cores. Here’s the specific press release quote again:

M5 features the world’s fastest performance core, with up to a 10-core CPU made up of six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores. Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4.

All well and good; the Arm-developed architecture analogy is big.LITTLE. Revisiting that page on Arm’s website just now, however, I curiously noticed that whereas it historically called out two different types of cores, now there are apparently three. Check out the subhead:

Arm big.LITTLE technology is a heterogeneous processing architecture that uses up to three types of processors. LITTLE processors are designed for maximum power efficiency, while big processors are designed to provide efficient, sustained compute performance.

Keep in mind that Apple is an Arm architecture licensee, so it develops its own (still instruction set-compatible, of course) cores. That said, beginning with the M5 Pro/Max processing chiplet, Apple has also developed a third core, this one an intermediate half-step between the performance and efficiency endpoints. You might think that Apple would call this new one the “balanced” core, say. But alas, you’d be wrong. Here’s long-time Apple observer Jason Snell, quoted in a post from another Apple prognosticator, “graybeard,” John Gruber:

With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power! Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency.

What did Apple decide to do instead, including a retrofit of published M5 documentation?

• The prior-named “Performance” core is now instead called, believe it or not, “Super.”
• The “Efficiency” core retains its original name, for a brief moment of sanity
• And the new in-between “balanced” core? It’s the recycled ”Performance” moniker.

The following summary table originated with another recent John Gruber post; I’ve simplified the SoC options, reordered the CPU core columns, and added a column for GPU core counts:

That’s just…super. Sigh.

(More) M5 MacBook Pros

(nifty video animation, eh?)

“Super” SoCs inside aside, the new 14” and 16” MacBook Pros are effectively identical to their M4-based forebears (note that the sole M5 version initially announced last fall was the 14” model). The only other items of particular note both involve memory. Baseline and upgraded DRAM capacity option prices remain the same as last time, despite current industry memory supply constraints; an upper-end 64 GByte option for the M5 Pro has even been added. And regarding flash memory, Apple has obsoleted last November’s entry-level 512 GByte SSD option for the baseline 14” M5 MacBook Pro, making the new capacity starting point for that product (1 TByte) more expensive than before. That said, it’s now $100 lower than the 1 TByte variant price at intro just a few months ago, and capacity-upgrade prices have also decreased.

The M5 MacBook Air(s)

Here’s another example of not being able to tell, based solely on external appearances, which generation of devices you’re looking at. Coming, as with its M3- and M4-based forebears, in both 13” and 15” versions, the M5 MacBook Air also upgrades to Apple’s N1 network connectivity chip. But, speaking once again of (flash, specifically) memory, and akin to the product line option slimming for the 14” M5 MacBook Pro mentioned in the prior section, the lowest-available capacity for the new devices is 512 GBytes, versus 256 GBytes in previous generation. I’m guessing that the reasoning is two-fold this time; as with the 14” M5 MacBook Pro’s option-culling, the company’s “hiding” its higher flash memory costs by only offering more profitable capacity choices to customers. Plus, by doing so, Apple can more clearly differentiate the MacBook Air from its other products. Speaking of which…

The MacBook Neo

I’ll kick off this section with a few history lessons. Back in 2015, Apple introduced the “new MacBook” (also commonly referred to as the “12” MacBook), with a Retina-resolution display and based on Intel m-series (and later, i-series) CPUs. It slotted between the then-non-Retina MacBook Air and the high-end MacBook Pro in Apple’s product portfolio from a pricing standpoint, even though its processing performance undershot that of the notably less expensive MacBook Air. Plus, it was hampered by the unreliable “butterfly” keyboard. It was discontinued after only three hardware iterations and four years of production.

In addition to its unfavorable price comparison to the MacBook Air, the “new MacBook” was also still competing to a degree against then-popular Windows-based “netbooks”, which were even lower priced. Back in late 2008, Former CEO Steve Jobs had (in)famously quipped re netbooks, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk.” Hold that thought.

My last history lesson is, conversely, a Steve Jobs success story. Back in mid-1999, two years (and change) after Jobs’ return to Apple and less than a year after launching the consumer-tailored iMac desktop, Apple unveiled the iBook laptop:

which came in multiple eye-catching, intentionally non-“business” color options:

Quoting Wikipedia:

The line targeted entry-level, consumer and education markets, with lower specifications and prices than the PowerBook, Apple’s higher-end line of laptop computers. It was the first mass consumer product to offer Wi-Fi network connectivity, which was then branded by Apple as AirPort.

Look again at the image of the iBook’s color options. Now look at the photo at the beginning of this section. See where I’m going?

The newly unveiled MacBook Neo comes in two price tiers: $599 (with a further $100 discount for education customers; take that, Chromebooks) and $699. The higher-end variant gets you twice the SSD capacity—512 GBytes versus 256 GBytes—along with a Touch ID fingerprint reader built into the keyboard. That’s it. 8 GBytes of DRAM, with no upgrade option. No Thunderbolt, only two USB-C ports, one of them supporting only USB 2 speeds. The first-time use of an A-series processor, the (Apple Intelligence-capable) A18 Pro (albeit with one fewer graphics core enabled than the initial version in the iPhone 16 Pro series); that said, it seems to benchmark (at least) roughly on par with the M1 that until recently was still being sold by Walmart in the MacBook Air. And a networking subsystem rumored to come from MediaTek, versus developed internally.

In closing, at least for this section: what’s with the name? Some folks had forecasted that it’d just be called the “MacBook”, but as I’ve already noted, that particular name is now “damaged goods”. Others thought that an “iBook” resurrection was in the cards, but Apple stopped referring to devices via “i” monikers a while ago. That said, “Neo” was definitely not on my bingo card. Maybe someone in Cupertino is a fan of The Matrix, but thought that “MacBook Mr. Anderson” would be too ponderous?

Displays

Having already passed through 2,000 words, I’m going to keep this section short. Apple announced two new Studio Display models, its first updates to this particular product category in many years. They’re both 27” in size, with 5K Retina resolutions, although their refresh rates, dynamic ranges, and other image quality measures vary. The “inexpensive” one starts at $1,599, with its pricier sibling beginning at $3,299; both are available in standard or (upgrade) nano-texture glass options, and mounting and other accessories are also available. And interestingly, at least to me, they don’t work with legacy Intel-based Macs, even the scant few models (one of which I’m currently typing on) that are still supported by MacOS 26. For more details, check out the press release.

And what about…

The M5 Mac mini, whose possibility I alluded to yesterday? Didn’t happen, even though the current M4-based models are popular with the agentic AI enthusiast community (and others). That said, in revisiting my prognostication yesterday afternoon, I remembered that Apple had also skipped the M3 Mac mini generation, and that said, the time-consuming form factor redesign development from the M2 to the M4 might have at least partly explained that delay.

And what of the upgrade to the “vanilla” iPad that lots of folks were forecasting would happen this week? Another nope. The primary rationale here was that it was the only remaining member of Apple’s current product line whose CPU (the A16) doesn’t support Apple Intelligence. But there was no evidence of the telltale indicator of a new product’s arrival: depleted retail inventories of the current model. My guess: Apple will be happily talking about AI again at this year’s WWDC, now that Google’s on board as the company’s development partner, and that’d be a perfect time to announce the “iPad 12”…or maybe “iPad Neo”? I jest (I hope).

Time to put down my cyber-pen and turn it over to you for your thoughts in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Principal at Sierra Media and a former technical editor at EDN Magazine, where he still regularly contributes as a freelancer.

Related Content

• MWC 2026: Apple, Google, Samsung and Other Contending Contestants
• Intel’s next-generation CPUs hide chiplets inside*
• Apple’s obvious misfires
• Evaluating value-oriented x86 CPUs: The price of falling prices

The post Apple’s spring 2026 soirée: The rest of the story appeared first on EDN.