M5 MacBook Pro review: Great laptop, but what’s new? – 9 to 5 Mac
New MacBook Pro: It’s all about the M5 chip
When Apple introduced the M5 MacBook Pro last week, it was pretty clear that it was a very minor update overall. Here’s a full comparison of everything that’s changed between the M5 and M4 MacBook Pro.
By far the biggest difference is the new M5 chip. That is what today’s reviews focus on.
Jason Snell writes at Six colors:
The new Apple M5 is based on a more advanced 3nm process. The ultra-fast “performance” CPU cores have been upgraded. The GPU has been redesigned, with neural accelerators, faster shader cores and next-generation ray tracing. Memory bandwidth has been expanded and disk read and write speeds have been doubled.
This is what Apple does: No each The processor aspect of Apple is updated every year, but each of them is updated every two or three years. The result is constant improvement, which is what happened this year. The M5 CPU core appears to be slightly 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 the M4 MacBook Air. And in terms of GPU performance, the M5 scored about 37% better than the M4 MacBook Air with the same number of GPU cores.
Snell’s review includes various graphs comparing performance across a wide range of devices. It compares the M5 MacBook Pro, M4 Pro and Max MacBook Pro, M4 MacBook Air, M2 and M3 Max MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air.
How much of an increase in speed will you feel? It all depends on the model you are coming from and of course your computing needs.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto writes at The Verge:
The M4 MacBook Pro already felt pretty fast. You’ll need to use the right AI applications and workflows to notice bigger differences. The new M5 neural accelerators on 10 GPU cores are the biggest change in the chip architecture. They are designed to provide a greater performance boost to applications that tap into 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 case of the Mac, where there are plenty of common workflows that really take advantage of the new power.
Power consumption with the M5 vs M4 chip
He mentioned one interesting detail Ars Technica is the difference between the M5 MacBook Pro in power consumption compared to last year’s model.
Andrew Cunningham explains in Ars Technica:
If there’s a downside to the M5 in our testing, it’s that the performance improvement seems to come with increased power consumption compared to the M4 when all the CPU cores are involved in the heavy lifting. According to macOS’s built-in powermetrics tool, the M5 consumed an average of 28W in our Handbrake video encoding test, compared to about 17W for the M4 running the same test.
Using software tools to compare power consumption between different chip manufacturers or even chip generations is risky because you believe that different hardware reports power consumption to the operating system in a similar way. But assuming they’re accurate, these numbers suggest that Apple might push the clock frequency more aggressively this generation to squeeze more performance out of the chip.
Apple claims the same “up to 24 hours” of battery life for the M5 MacBook Pro as the M4 model. And there is no reason to believe that this is not true.
However, some tasks seem to drain the M5’s battery more than the M4’s, even though others are potentially more energy efficient.
M5 MacBook Pro: overall review summary
As we all expected based on the M5 MacBook Pro’s relatively minor differences from last year’s model, the reviews confirm that this device is not intended for M4 owners.
If you’re on an older model, the M5 MacBook Pro is a strong all-around option. But not much has changed this year.
Tony Polanco writes at Tom’s guide:
Those who own a MacBook Pro M4 don’t need to upgrade to this year’s model, as most features are still available. However, if you have an older M-series Pro (or even Intel), then you won’t be disappointed with the new MacBook Pro M5.
Even if it is eventually surpassed in terms of performance by the inevitable M5 Pro and M5 Max, this M5 laptop will still be one of the best.
What are your takeaways from the M5 MacBook Pro reviews? Let us know in the comments.
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