Most people upgrade their MacBook Pro no more frequently than once every five years, and some leave it considerably longer than that. But Apple always makes it sound like even last year’s model is now hopelessly outdated, something it did again with the launch of the M5 MacBook Pro.
There’s no doubt that the company is achieving incredibly impressive year-on-year increases in Apple Silicon performance, but real-life tests show that upgrading from one generation to the next doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of MacBook owners …
Apple’s claims
Here’s what Apple had to say when it announced the M5 chip:
Apple today announced M5, delivering the next big leap in AI performance and advances to nearly every aspect of the chip. Built using third-generation 3-nanometer technology, M5 introduces a next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling GPU-based AI workloads to run dramatically faster, with over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4. The GPU also offers enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing that combined deliver a graphics performance that is up to 45 percent higher than M4. M5 features the world’s fastest performance core, with up to a 10-core CPU made up of six efficiency cores and up to four performance cores. Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4. M5 also features an improved 16-core Neural Engine, a powerful media engine, and a nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s.
Sounds like a pretty dramatic difference within a single generation, and the claims are indeed backed by benchmark tests.
Benchmark results
Benchmarks are very handy things. They provide an objective, independent measure of manufacturer claims, and help to separate the hype from the reality.
At the same time, they are only truly meaningful if you are performing very similar tasks in your real-life usage of a device. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in a comparison carried out by Macworld’s John Brandon.
In one half of his comparison, he ran a number of benchmarks to show impressive differences between the M4 and M5 MacBook Pro. For example, SSD speeds:
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