GoKawiilApple’s new MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips arrive this Wednesday, and reviews for the latest models have just arrived. Here’s what reviewers are saying.
M5 Pro and M5 Max chips: Powerful performance, but faster SSDs offer big boost too
Most features of the new MacBook Pro are the same as the M4 models launched in late 2024.
However, the biggest difference comes in the chips, with M5 Pro and M5 Max offering impressive gains.
Here are your M5 Max benchmarks compared to M4 Max and M3 Ultra pic.twitter.com/9qlLr74Vys — Max Weinbach (@mweinbach) March 9, 2026
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.
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