M5 MacBook Pro review: The ultimate computer?
The new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro is very much like its M4 predecessor, in that it’s got all the advantages of being a MacBook Pro, but by using Apple’s lowest-end M5 chip, it’s also the most affordable model.
Except it’s not the lowest-end M5 chip, at least not so far. It’s the only one. Apple has released a single M5 chip and placed it in three products: this laptop, an iPad Pro, and a Vision Pro. We can probably assume that MacBook Pros powered by M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are in the offing, but unlike in the M4 generation, this base-model MacBook Pro is the only Mac on stage at the debut.
The third-wheel laptop
For years, Apple struggled with what to do with the low-end MacBook Pro. Clearly, there was demand for that device—I suspect primarily from businesses that weren’t interested in buying a “consumer” device like the MacBook Air. It was an odd duck, to be sure. At one point, it was the only MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar and with an Escape key. It was the first M1 MacBook Pro to debut, but it did so in an old design and, just like this year, without the support of its higher-end bandmates, who were busy being redesigned.
It took a few cycles for everything to sync up, but the M3 and M4 generations essentially turned the low-end MacBook Pro from that odd duck into a pretty graceful swan. The low-end MacBook Pro has pretty much everything you’d want in a MacBook Pro, from its beautiful, bright XDR screen to an array of ports. It’s the same on the $1599 MacBook Pro as on its much more expensive counterparts. Only the chip is different.
Bad news for Captain Dunsel
This time, the chip is very different. Apple’s new M5 is based on a more advanced 3nm process. The ultra-fast “performance” CPU cores have been upgraded. The GPU has been rearchitected, with neural accelerators, faster shader cores, and next-generation ray tracing. Memory bandwidth has been expanded, and disk read and write speeds have doubled.
This is what Apple does: Not every aspect of Apple’s processor is upgraded every year, but each one gets updated every two or three years. The result is a constant improvement, which is what has happened this year. The M5 CPU core appears to be a little less than 9% faster than the M4, which still makes it Apple’s fastest core ever. On multi-core performance, the M5 MacBook Pro was about 19% faster than an M4 MacBook Air. And on GPU performance, the M5 scored about 37% better than an M4 MacBook Air with the same number of GPU cores.
But nobody should update from an M4 device to an M5 device unless they’ve accidentally dropped their laptop from a great height. However, it’s now been five years since the first M1 devices arrived, and comparing today’s M5 MacBook Pro to those original M1 models really exposes the long-term benefits of regular iteration. This new laptop improves on the M1 by 79% on single CPU core, is twice as fast at multi-core CPU tests, and 2.5 times as fast on GPU scores.
For the last few years, I’ve used these reviews to nudge Intel MacBook users to finally take the plunge. So, public service announcement: Yeah, it’s time. But if you’re using an M1 laptop, especially an M1 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, it’s probably also time to consider whether an upgrade might be worth it.
Connectivity issues
It’s great that the low-end MacBook Pro is no longer a lesser laptop when compared to the models with more powerful chips. But the entire MacBook Pro line, which is largely unchanged other than chips since 2021, is starting to feel a little stale.
The biggest disappointment is probably wireless connectivity. The MacBook Pro still doesn’t support Wi-Fi 7 or Bluetooth 6 (it’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3). We all know that Apple doesn’t always rush to support new connectivity standards, but in this case, Apple is supporting those standards—on the iPhone and iPad, but not the Mac. Apple is justifiably proud of its new N1 chip, which provides that connectivity to those other products—and yet it’s apparently going to be another product cycle where Macs are lagging behind.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the fact that we’re now entering another Mac release cycle with no cellular option on Apple’s laptops. This has been a perplexing omission for years—tethering to a phone is not a cure-all, and Apple’s been offering cellular iPads since the very beginning. But it’s now officially extra baffling, because Apple is shipping its very own C1 and C1X chips in iPhones and iPads. Apple now makes its own cellular radios, but still refuses to put them in Macs. If not now, when?
Where does this laptop fit?
The M5 MacBook Pro has nothing to be ashamed of. When you consider the power of the M5 processor, even though the M5 MacBook Pro offers fewer GPU cores and therefore less performance than even the existing M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro models (let alone possible M5 versions), it’s still plenty powerful for all but the most challenging tasks.
That much is true, but it’s also still a bit of a tweener. It’s got active cooling, an additional Thunderbolt port, HDMI and SD card ports, and a bigger, brighter screen (with glare-resistant nanotexture option!) than the MacBook Air—but the M4 Air is cheaper and lighter, and there’s probably an M5 Air just around the corner. Unless you need some of those only-on-Pros features, the Air is probably a better choice.
And if you do need those features? Then the opposite argument holds: if you’re in such specific need of pro-level features, perhaps it’s worth it to go up to the M4 Pro model, which offers dramatically more GPU performance—or to hold out for a theoretical M5 Pro model?
This is one of the problems with the Apple Silicon era of Macs: It’s really just too good. The chips are so powerful that they’re in danger of making any model above the M5 MacBook Pro increasingly niche.
So maybe that’s where the M5 MacBook Pro fits: It’s a computer for people who feel they need more than a MacBook Air can give them, but don’t have a reasonable argument why they might need the high-end performance of a Pro or Max-level chip. That’s probably a bigger percentage of the Mac-using population than you might expect, and I’d imagine that it’s going to keep growing.
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