Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro arrives in stores this week, and the first reviews have just arrived. Here are the highlights of everything you should know about the M5 MacBook pro.
New MacBook Pro: It’s all about the M5 chip
When Apple unveiled the M5 MacBook Pro last week, it was pretty clear that this was a very minor update overall. Here’s a full comparison of everything that’s changed between M5 and M4 MacBook Pro.
The biggest difference, by far, is the new M5 chip. So that’s what today’s reviews focus on primarily.
Jason Snell writes at Six Colors:
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.
Snell’s review includes a variety of charts comparing performance across a wide lineup of devices. He compares the M5 MacBook Pro, M4 Pro and Max MacBook Pros, M4 MacBook Air, M2 and M3 Max MacBook Pros, and M1 MacBook Air.
How much will you feel the speed increases? It all depends on the model you’re coming from, and your computing needs of course.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto writes at The Verge:
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.
It’s a similar story to the M5 iPad Pro, except in the Mac’s case, there are plenty of common workflows that actually take advantage of the new power.
Power draw with the M5 chip vs M4
One interesting detail mentioned by Ars Technica is the M5 MacBook Pro’s difference in power draw versus last year’s model.
Andrew Cunningham explains at Ars Technica:
If there’s a downside to the M5 in our testing, it’s that its performance improvements seem to come with increased power draw relative to the M4 when all the CPU cores are engaged in heavy lifting. According to macOS built-in powermetrics tool, the M5 drew an average 28 W of power in our Handbrake video encoding test, compared to around 17 W for the M4 running the same test. Using software tools to compare power draw between different chip manufacturers or even chip generations is dicey, because you’re trusting that different hardware is reporting its power use to the operating system in similar ways. But assuming they’re accurate, these numbers suggest that Apple could be pushing clock speeds more aggressively this generation to squeeze more performance out of the chip.
Apple quotes the same “up to 24 hours” of battery life for the M5 MacBook Pro as the M4 model. And there’s no reason to believe that’s not true.
However, it appears that certain tasks may bring a bigger battery drain with M5 than M4, even while others potentially are more energy efficient.
M5 MacBook Pro: overall review summary
Like we all expected based on the M5 MacBook Pro’s relatively minor differences versus last year’s model, reviews confirm that this device isn’t meant for M4 owners.
If you’re using an older model, the M5 MacBook Pro is a strong all-around option. But not a lot has changed this year.
Tony Polanco writes at Tom’s Guide:
Those who own a MacBook Pro M4 don’t have to upgrade to this year’s model, since you still have most of the same features. However, if you have an older M-series Pro (or even an Intel one), then you won’t be disappointed with the new MacBook Pro M5. Even if it’s eventually outclassed by the inevitable M5 Pro and M5 Max models in terms of power, this M5 laptop will still be one of the finest around.
Here are some video reviews to check out too:
What are your takeaways from the M5 MacBook Pro reviews? Let us know in the comments.
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