Apple MacBook Pro (M5 Max, 16-inch) Review: The Fastest MacBook Yet

My test unit was provided by Apple for review. It was a 16 inch model with the M5 Max under the hood. As always, you can get the M5 Max in the 14-inch size, and that’s my choice. You need a 16-incher if you’re pro-level applications all day and don’t plan on using an external monitor, but 4.7 pounds is a lot to pack in, and it doesn’t exactly fit on a coffee shop table.

There are no changes to the display, speakers, or webcam, but everything remains high-quality. That is especially true of speakers. I’ve always said that the six-speaker sound on the 16-inch MacBook Pro is good enough to throw a party with and it’s louder, louder, and louder than any Bluetooth speaker you carry. The display also comes with an optional $150 upgrade of nano-texture glass, which is well worth the money. It’s as clear as a glossy screen and deflects light and flicker like a matte.

Tandem OLED is reportedly coming. The color accuracy, clarity, and low input lag of OLED are unmatched, but beating the current Mini-LED MacBook Pro will be a tall order. It gets good HDR performance, coming out with a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits. Games, videos, and movies look great.

Similarly, the 24 hours of battery life has also changed from previous generations. And while it won’t last that long in your daily commute, it’s in another league compared to other Windows laptops like the Asus ProArt P16. Those laptops can compete in power, but not in battery life.

The holes have also not changed in this model. However, Thunderbolt 5 was first released in the last generation MacBook Pro, and has become more useful in the past year as more accessories and docking stations have become available that can take advantage of the higher bandwidth. I still wish there were more Thunderbolt 5 external SSDs out there to take advantage of those higher bandwidth speeds.

This is sad

Let’s get to the point indeed Key to this model: M5 Max performance. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max build on improvements already hidden in the base M5 chip, such as improved single-core performance and significant GPU power. The chips are integrated together using the new Fusion architecture previously found in the Ultra chips on the Mac Studio desktop. The M5 Max is it two pieces of silicon, a major shift from Apple’s previous strategy of building a single, high-performance chip. I don’t believe we’re really seeing the fruit of that change yet, but it could be an important key to the direction the company’s chips will go in the future.

All that said, performance on the M5 Max MacBook Pro is stellar. And by stellar, I mean annoying. And by angry, I mean it’s so fast that it’s hard to know what to throw at it. It breaks records according to standard CPU benchmarks such as Cinebench and Geekbench 6. And remember: You can get 7 percent more multicore performance if you use High Power mode, which boosts the fans.