MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max review: Incredibly fast

Jason Snell writes at Six Colors:

To summarize, the overall M5 CPU is 15% faster than the M4 generation, and the Pro and Max 15- or 18-core CPU configurations will blow my 10-core M4 Max out of the water. My review unit is 23% faster than my M4 Max laptop.

As you might expect, GPU performance on Pro laptops really depends on which class of chip you buy. Max versions have more GPUs and will produce better performance. That said, my M4 Max’s Metal score was about 14 percent ahead of the M5 Pro’s, despite the fact that my M4 Max had 32 GPU cores instead of the M5 Pro’s 20. It’s pretty impressive, and the M5 Max is there if you really want an insane amount of GPU cores to work on your GPU intensive workflows.

Apple claims its MacBook Pro ‘super cores’ are the fastest CPU cores in the world. Tom’s Hardware tested that, running the M5 Max on several competing PCs.

The new MacBook Pro did not disappoint, and its SSD speed was a big surprise.

In Geekbench 6, Apple’s super cores were the fastest in the single-core test, with a score of 4,338. In multi-core, super and performance cores reached 29,430, destroying the entire field. The next highest of the two was the ZenBook Duo, with 3,031 and 17,283 points, respectively.

Apple showed up in our file transfer test. It claims its SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation, and the results speak for themselves. The MacBook Pro finished our 25GB file transfer test with a rate of 3,835.38 MBps. Next fastest, at 1,724.69 MBps, was Framework.

In our Handbrake video encoding test, the Mac converted 4K video to 1080p in 1 minute 55 seconds. That’s about a minute and a half faster than the next fastest, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, at 3:18.

The Verge he adds: “The new high-end M5 chip brings improvements, none more noticeable than the SSD’s massive read/write speeds.”

For more on the new types of cores Apple is using in its MacBook Pro, Brian Westover writes at PCMag:

In a sense, with the M5 Pro and Max, Apple is taking its usual “big.LITTLE” tier and, in these chips, adopting something you might call “bigger.BIG,” with performance cores as common as core-tier cores. These cores are multithread workhorses, offering better performance and flexibility than super cores, but without the limitations that sometimes make high-performance cores (the third chip core category) a bottleneck.

M5 MacBook Pro review: wrap up

If you’re looking for a new MacBook Pro with a bunch of new features, that model is coming later this year.

With this latest MacBook Pro, the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are really the only significant changes. The Apple N1 wireless chip is a good thing too, but the main reason is to improve performance. And based on these early reviews, Apple has absolutely delivered on that front.

Are you planning to upgrade to a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro or M5 Max? What motivates the purchase? Let us know in the comments.

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