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

Jason Snell writes at Six Colors:

To summarize, the M5 CPU core is about 15% faster than the M4 generation, and the Pro and Max 15- or 18-core CPU configurations are going to 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 the Pro laptops really depends on which chip class you buy. The Max versions have way more GPU cores and will generate much better performance. That said, my M4 Max’s Metal score was only about 14 percent ahead of the M5 Pro’s, despite my M4 Max having 32 GPU cores instead of the M5 Pro’s 20. It’s pretty impressive, and the M5 Max is there if you really want a ridiculous number of GPU cores to apply to your GPU-intensive workflows.

Apple claims that its MacBook Pro ‘super cores’ are the fastest CPU cores in the world. Tom’s Hardware put that to the test, pitting M5 Max against several competing PCs.

The new MacBook Pro didn’t disappoint, and its SSD speeds were a key surprise.

On Geekbench 6, Apple’s super cores were the fastest in single-core testing, with a score of 4,338. In multi-core, the super and performance cores reached 29,430, devastating the rest of the field. The next highest in both was the ZenBook Duo, with scores of 3,031 and 17,283, respectively.

Apple showed off 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 completed our 25GB file transfer test at a rate of 3,835.38 MBps. The next fastest, at 1,724.69 MBps, was the Framework.

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

The Verge adds: “The new high-end M5 chip delivers improvements, none more noticeable than the huge SSD read/write speed boost.”

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

In a sense, with M5 Pro and Max, Apple is taking its usual “big.LITTLE” core hierarchy and, in these chips, adopting something you might call “bigger.BIG,” with traditional performance cores as the lower-tier cores. These performance cores are the multithread workhorses, offering better efficiency and dynamic range than the super cores, but without the limitations that sometimes made efficiency cores (the third tier of chip core) into a bottleneck.

M5 MacBook Pro reviews: wrap-up

If you’re looking for a radical 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 truly are the only significant changes. Apple’s N1 wireless chip is a nice perk too, but the main reason to upgrade is for sheer performance. And based on these early reviews, Apple has absolutely delivered on that front.

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

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