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.
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