Apple MacBook Pro M5 review: new chip, same greatness

Last year’s entry-level MacBook Pro was an impressive return to form for Apple’s Pro laptop. Between the M4 chip, increased RAM, improved webcam, and a third Thunderbolt 4 port, the most affordable MacBook Pro was also one of the best deals in Apple’s lineup.

The M5 sequel is mostly a copy-paste of the same machine — an annual Madden NFL release in laptop form. But instead of a glorified roster update, you get a slightly faster chip and much faster storage, potentially speeding things up when working on big project files and cutting down on time looking at progress bars.

That’s mostly it. The screen, design, ports, speakers, webcam, and just about everything in between is unchanged from the M4 model. If you bought one of those, congratulations — keep living your life with your very good laptop. There’s no cause for FOMO with the M5.

But if you’re using a much older laptop and looking for a powerful new machine that doesn’t cost a fortune, the entry-level MacBook Pro continues to reign supreme. And this year’s model is ever so slightly better than before.

The M5 MacBook Pro feels all the same as last year’s M4, down to the exact dimensions and weight. There isn’t even a new color to mix things up. But unlike the last time Apple gave its base MacBook Pro a straight chip bump, this isn’t a holdover of an outdated design. The M4 MacBook Pro had the same design, number of ports, and upgrade options as those on the higher-end M4 Pro and M4 Max models of the laptop. Each of those factors is still here with the M5 model, and still starting at $1,599.

Beyond modest improvements to the M5 chip, the other speed upgrade that stands out here is to the laptop’s storage. Each SSD option on the M5 MacBook Pro, from 512GB up to the overkill (and overly expensive) $1,200 4TB option, is faster than its respective tier from the M4. The 1TB drive in the M4 MacBook Pro had good sequential read / write speeds, but the 1TB in the M5 version more than doubles that. It can now hang with the speedier 2TB and 4TB SSDs that are in the M4 Pro and M4 Max models.

Our review unit came with a 1TB SSD upgrade and the optional anti-glare display, speccing out to $1,949 total. Both of these are nice-to-have upgrades if you’re willing to spend extra, but don’t feel compelled to splurge for either. You’ll quickly find yourself spiraling down Apple’s pricing funnel, placing you just $50 shy of the 14-inch M4 Pro model, which is still faster than the M5 and has 24GB of RAM and more future-proof Thunderbolt 5 ports. The base model M5 with a glossy screen, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage should meet most needs.

Tests and synthetic benchmarks I ran on the M5 showed small speed gains, particularly across creative tools. Geekbench and Cinebench CPU tests ranged from an 8 to 16 percent improvement. PugetBench tests for Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and DaVinci Resolve scored 17 to 33 percent higher.

Do you actually feel all those speed enhancements in your day-to-day? Not really. The M4 MacBook Pro already felt pretty fast. You’ll need to use the right apps and AI workflows to possibly notice bigger differences. The M5’s new Neural Accelerators on its 10 GPU cores are the biggest change to the chip’s architecture. They’re designed to give a bigger boost in performance to apps that hit the GPU for AI tasks, with Apple promising a 3.5x speed improvement over the M4 when it comes to AI tasks. It’s something you’ll see in specialized workflows, like using AI upscaling in Topaz Video and Enhance Speech in Premiere Pro.

Most people won’t be coming from an M4, though. The M5’s speedy performance, especially in terms of real-world feel, will be much more noticeable if you’re coming from Intel-based Macs, which are now on their last big macOS updates, or an early M-series processor, especially ones that had slower SSDs.

Apple continues to tout Mac gaming in its announcements and keynotes, so I decided to give it a test on the M5 MacBook Pro. I booted up the nearly five-year-old Cyberpunk 2077, which is now fully supported on Macs, and found that the default “For this Mac” graphical preset bakes in some very aggressive constraints: limiting the game to a 1080p-ish 1800 x 1125 resolution with dynamic scaling and locking frame rate to just 30fps. It’s playable and steady, but Cyberpunk has become the industry standard showpiece of high-end graphics for a reason — and playing it this way ain’t it. Turning off V-sync from that overprotective parent of a preset at least allows the frame rate to climb to a more respectable 48fps average; it still looks okay at best. This marked a small upgrade over the M4, though: the older machine averages 40fps when turning off V-sync.

I also ran Cyberpunk’s benchmark on the M5 and M4 in a couple tests we normally run on Windows gaming laptops — using Ultra settings without ray tracing or any resolution scaling at 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1200. An $1,800 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 5060 GPU more than doubles the average frame rate of the M5 Mac in these benchmark runs, making it readily apparent that AAA gaming is still best on Windows. The MacBook Pro is able to handle some fantastic and far less demanding indie games, like Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II, but those play well on just about anything — even a Steam Deck.

Despite my whiny gamer woes, there’s still no beating the entry-level MacBook Pro as the go-to option for students in creative fields, or for anyone doing light photo and video editing, if an M4 Pro or Max version is out of your price range. Like the previous generation, it’s the Pro for the Everyday Joe who wants to go beyond the performance a MacBook Air offers. Or, at the very least, prefers a Mac with a better screen, louder speakers, and more ports on offer.

Battery life on the 14-inch Pro is even a little better than the already great 13- and 15-inch Airs, too. The M5 easily lasted me a whole, nearly nonstop nine-hour workday filled with everyday productivity apps (Slack, Chrome, and Google Docs) plus some Lightroom Classic photo editing and plenty of music listening thrown into the mix. And just like last year, the machine doesn’t get very warm to the touch or particularly loud with fan noise — even when you’re really pushing it.

Rumors indicate a bigger redesign of the MacBook Pro line is coming a year or so down the road, but the M5 14-inch is still an excellent upgrade for now. It remains the sweet-spot mid-tier option in Apple’s lineup. And as uninspired as this chip refresh is, there’s no denying it’s a great laptop made ever so slightly better.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge