💻 MacBook Pro 14: M5 vs M4 vs M3

Across these three base 14-inch MacBook Pros the chassis, the 3024 × 1964 mini-LED ProMotion XDR panel and the 1.55 kg weight are unchanged, so the upgrade story is entirely on the inside. The M3 is the outlier and the one to move off: it shipped with only 8 GB starting memory, a 600-nit SDR display, a 1080p webcam and just two Thunderbolt ports on the base chip — a meaningfully thinner specification than its successors. The M4 closed almost all of those gaps in one step (16 GB base memory, 1000-nit SDR brightness, a 12 MP Center Stage camera and a third Thunderbolt port), which makes it the single biggest year-on-year jump in this line and still a thoroughly capable business machine. The M5 layers on per-GPU-core Neural Accelerators for roughly 8× the on-device AI throughput of the original M1, third-generation ray tracing and Wi-Fi 7 via Apple's N1 platform, but for everyday Office, Teams and developer work it tracks the M4 closely. For UK fleets the verdict is clear: retire M3 units at the next refresh — the 8 GB base and shorter macOS runway will bite — and standardise new purchases on M5; M4 estates are in great shape and can comfortably run another cycle unless Apple Intelligence or local-LLM workloads are central to the role.

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