#apple-imac

#apple-imac

The MacBook Air maintained its place on the throne as 'Most Popular Notebook,' with Apple boosting memory to 16GB while pruning $100 off the cost.

Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver "up to 2x" the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 Pro and Max laptops. In our testing, the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro bore that out: our unit could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed.

It's not the basic MacBook. Or the cheap MacBook. Or the mini MacBook. It's the MacBook "Neo," meaning new or young-a fresh take on an old idea. Love the name or hate it, you likely see what Apple was attempting to communicate from a marketing perspective. It's meant to be a new kind of Mac for a new generation-perhaps an attempt to recapture a generation that's only been exposed to iPads and Chromebooks.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an 'all-new Fusion Architecture' like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon.

Sure, the AirPods Max come in colors - but there's something so cold and un-emotional about anodized aluminum. It grabs your eye, but then immediately lets your eye wander once your fingers have run past its cool matte surface. Aluminum's only purpose was to help build devices that were sleek and thermally advantageous. The problem, however, is that the AirPods Max aren't 'sleeker' than your average headphone.