The four areas that do improve are everything except the silicon. 9to5Mac frames the launch as a major upgrade with one problem, and the problem is the chip. The redesign touches the chassis, the display, the ports, and at least one other area — but the compute core stays put, meaning the performance ceiling is unchanged.

That is the entire story. A five-year redesign that does not change the processor is a body swap, not a generation jump. The 'huge upgrade' language in the coverage is doing rhetorical work that the hardware does not.

The Decoder's coverage of Block's Dessa speech model places that AI workload on an M4 Max MacBook Pro, a generation behind the M5 silicon that 9to5Mac identifies as the current baseline. If the M5 is already shipping, the M4 Max reference is a prior-generation machine, and the 'current' in 'same chips as current models' points to M5. But the two sources never reconcile which generation is actually in the store right now, and nobody has measured the performance delta between M4 Max and M5 Max on a sustained AI workload.

Sources: 9to5Mac, The Decoder.

The 'huge upgrade' framing in 9to5Mac's headline is undercut by the unchanged silicon. The four advantages are everything except the processor, making this a body swap rather than a generation jump. The M4 Max reference in The Decoder's Block coverage introduces a generation ambiguity that neither source resolves, leaving open whether 'current' means M4 or M5 in the retail lineup.