Transcription
All right, the new MacBook Pro 14s with the M5 Pro and Max chips, they are here.
Now, on the surface, it may look like a pretty boring update, but do keep in mind competitors, Windows competitors that is, their prices have gone up a lot this year. These Macs, they really haven't. So, that makes them just far more appealing.
Now, speaking personally, I use the MacBook Pro 14. It is one of my two daily drivers. I genuinely wanted to know, should I upgrade and which model should I get? So, we bought all of them. Now, I do value your time. I really do. And this is a long video. I'm just going to tell you what I think you need to know about these new MacBook Pro 14s right now.
The base M5 model, it's the one to get if you don't need performance, but you want the better screen and ports that the MacBook Pro 14 has that the Air does not. It gives you the longest battery life. It is the most affordable, but it barely performs better than the Air.
If you do want performance, the M5 Pro 15 core model, it is really the sweet spot this year. It is plenty powerful for most applications and this year it's configured correctly for most people. It still has 24 gig of memory, but it starts at 1 TB of storage. It can really do everything pretty well.
If you're only doing tasks on your MacBook that uses the CPU and not really the GPU, and you want the best performance in that 14-in chassis, that's where you should get the M5 Pro 18 core. It has essentially the same CPU as the M5 Max ones.
On the M5 Max, it is a dream for high-end creative work and anyone who uses the GPU a lot like AI developers. That config, it really impressed us, but it is more expensive and it has the worst battery life.
If you're deciding between a MacBook Pro 14 or 16, you don't lose as much performance as we actually expected when you place one of these powerful chips in the smaller chassis. Choosing to buy the larger MacBook Pro 16, it should really be whether you want that bigger screen, the better battery life, and a cooler filling laptop that's when under load.
If you're coming from an older MacBook, these new ones have a little worse battery life, but they are significantly faster. That's specifically when you're comparing to an M3 series or earlier. On that note, if you can find an M4 series on a decent sale, I'd get that over one of these new ones. That's unless you're doing something that really uses the GPU. That's where these new M5 series really shine.
Please don't base your decision on Wi-Fi 7. Apple's implementation of it just sucks. It isn't that much better than their Wi-Fi 6E. Same goes for the faster storage. It just doesn't really matter that much. That's my summary. Here's the details.
Let's start with battery life. We hit all these MacBooks with our new tougher battery test. That's where the screens are now brighter. We're doing office tasks first video playback and Bluetooth is left on. The base MacBook Pro 14 with the M5 chip, it has the best battery life. It lasted almost 10 and 1/2 hours. At around 1.5 hours less are the MacBook Pro 14s with the M5 Pro chips. They lasted 9 hours. The MacBook Pro 14 with the M5 Max chip, it has the worst battery life at just over 8 hours.
Looking at these battery results, I have to admit, guys, I am a bit disappointed. You see, the older MacBook Pros with the higher-end M3 Pro and M4 Pro chips, they actually lasted longer than the models that they are replacing. And keep in mind, our older MacBooks, they do have degraded batteries. You see, I've used both of these as my daily drivers for a year or so each. That is, and I've used them unplugged a lot.
Anyway, if you get one of these chips in the larger MacBook Pro 16, you'll get an extra 1.5 to 2 hours of battery life. The bigger battery, it far outweighs the extra energy required by that larger panel. Finally, as you can see from our graph, Apple is no longer the battery life king. Intel's new Panther Lake, it kind of sometimes wears that crown, but it depends which laptop it's in. The Dell XPS14, it is highly optimized for battery life. It only feeds its processor 25 W amongst other things. And this is the better config, by the way, with the higher quality tandem OLED screen and the more powerful Panther Lake X chip. The lower config of the Dell XPS14, it lasts even longer. But as you can see, the Expert BBook Ultra with the same chip that is, it lasts a lot less and it is more comparable to the MacBook Pros.
If you're wondering whether these MacBooks continue to maintain their performance when you're unplugged, they do. In fact, they always perform a little bit better. I have a hypothesis here. I think that charging a laptop, it generates heat, and that takes away from how well these laptops can cool their processors.
If you're planning on doing creative work on your MacBook Pro 14, just like I do, it is a dream. That is so long as you can get one with an M5 Pro or Max chip. Now, I'm going to start with Premiere Pro because, as I said, that's what we use here, and I am genuinely trying to work out which one should I keep. I played back a minute of one of our videos on each of these laptops. Playback was very stuttery on the base MacBook Pro with the M5 chip. It dropped around 500 frames during 60 seconds. That was at 4K resolution, though. When I did drop down to half resolution, it only dropped between 20 to 30 frames. So, not bad. the occasional stutter, but please keep in mind our videos are probably middle of the range in terms of their complexity, and this was a simpler section of our timeline.
When I tested the MacBook Pro with the lower of the two M5 Pro chips, playback was much smoother. They only dropped 50 frames at full resolution and no frames at half. The MacBook Pro 14 with the Max chip, it dropped virtually no frames at all, even at full resolution. By the way, you may think the reason our base MacBook Pro did so badly here is because it only has 16 gig of memory. We don't think this is the case for our videos. We previously had a MacBook Pro 14 in with an M5 chip and 24 gig of memory. We did a full video export on both the 16 gig and 24 gig versions. We saw no difference in export times. Obviously, this is a different test, but I think an export is actually tougher than a timeline playback.
On the topic of exporting, speed matters to me a lot. You see, I export very late at night sometimes. Oftentimes I have to export multiple times as people I share the video with find things that I need to change. The M5 Max MacBook Pros, they were the fastest and there wasn't that much of a difference between the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 with that chip. The MacBook Pro 14s with the M5 Pro chips, they were about 40% slower in exporting. In this test, it doesn't really matter which of the two Pro chips you get. The extra GPU cores, they don't really help out. My gut is that the media engine is probably the bottleneck. You see the M5 and both M5 Pro chips, they have only one. The M5 Max chips, they have two media engines. Exporting it heavily uses those engines as it rapidly decodes footage, makes changes to the frames, if there are any, that is, and then re-encodes it.
Compared to older MacBook Pros, there isn't much of a difference if you're coming from an M4 Pro, but there is a big difference if you're coming from an M3 Pro. In exporting, these new ones are around twice as fast. Just to clarify something, the M4 Pro and M3 Pro that I'm showing you here, those are the faster of the two chips that were available from those generations.
If you're considering a Windows laptop, an Nvidia 570Ti or higher, is definitely faster than an M5 Pro chip, at least for this task. And keep in mind, the Zephris G14, which is a similar size to a MacBook Pro 14, it has one of the weakest implementations of that GPU. Others feed at 140 W. An RTX 5060 is a little slower than an M5 Pro chip, but it is much faster than a base M5 chip.
To get a benchmark result, we ran Puget's updated test. Here you can see the Max chips perform better than the Pros. Once again, very little difference which MacBook size you get one in, though. There is a decent drop in performance from the M5 Max MacBook Pros down to the M5 Pro chips, but not a huge difference between each of them. The older MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro is only slightly slower, but the M3 Pro is even slower than it was before. It's now behind the M5 Air.
In this benchmark, the MacBook Pros with the Pro and Max chips, they are faster than the Zephus G16 with its 5070Ti. We had to test that laptop, the G16, that is, not the G14, as we no longer have that smaller one in. And as I said, this is a new test. The power fed though between those two laptops to the GPU is similar and neither of them is as powerful as thicker gaming laptops with that GPU. But we chose those comps as they are similar in size to the MacBook Pros which makes the Mac's performance just even more impressive. The fact that these laptops can deliver this kind of performance in such a small chassis, it is amazing.
In Da Vinci Resolve Studio, it's a similar result overall to Premiier that is with maybe one notable change. We finally see some difference between the M5 Pro 20 core GPU and the M5 Pro 16 core, but it's very small. Now, we didn't test Apple's Final Cut because we focus on tests that run natively on both Windows and Mac OS. You see, we try to be well-rounded reviewers here. We try to compare all similar laptops, not just those from Apple, but we are always trying to improve. So, do drop a comment down below if you think that we should add Final Cut.
I think this video is long enough though. Now, if you are doing 3D rendering, we tested Blender splash screen render. Once again, the max powered MacBook Pros are in the lead. There's a slight advantage to getting it in the 16-in. Here, we do see a difference in performance between the M5 Pros with the 16 core config being around 20% slower than the 20 core GPU model. No surprises as rendering uses GPU cores. The new M5 Pros, they are a bit faster than the M4 Pro. They're much faster than the M5 base chip and the M3 Pro. In this test, Nvidia's GPUs, they do well. The RTX 570 Ti is only a little behind the Max chip in the MacBook Pro 14. And as I said before, the G14, it's a pretty slow implementation of that GPU.
On that note, let's switch to something that Nvidia laptops do very well, gaming. We ran the Still Nomad Light benchmark. This is one of the few modern gaming benchmarks that actually runs both natively on Mac OS, that is using Metal, and Windows using DirectX. Nvidia's 570 Ti, which you can absolutely buy in laptops at this price point, is in the lead. It beats out the MacBook Pros with the M5 Max 32 core GPUs. The MacBook Pro 16, it performs slightly better with that chip than the 14. That being said, I do want to point out something very important here. The MacBook Pro 14 with the Max chip has a total power envelope of a little less than 100 W. That includes the CPU and the rest of the laptop. Now, the Nvidia GPU in the Zephris G16, it can draw around 125 watts alone. So, you can really see how much more efficient Apple's GPUs are. The MacBook Pros with an M5 Pro chip, they fall a little behind a 5060. The base M5 MacBook Pro with a 10 core GPU falls a little behind Intel's integrated B390, that's the one in their new Panther Lake X laptops.
For actual gaming, we tried Cyberpunk 2077, which also runs natively on both Mac OS and Windows. The Pro and the Max M5 MacBook Pros are all playable above 60 frames per second on average. In full transparency, this is an older AAA title and we are running it at 1920 x 1200 resolution, so it's not the most demanding test, but on a 14-in display, 1920 x 1200, it's totally fine. The base M5 MacBook Pro, it does beat the Air by quite a bit here, likely because it has a fan to cool its processor, but it's still really not that playable. You can also see here once again that the Max chip performs better in the MacBook Pro 16 versus the 14. You get 12 extra frames. This is also another test where you see that the 20 core GPU in the higher-end pro chip beats the 16 core one, but folks, it's really not the biggest difference. If you want more frames though, you can turn on frame gen. It definitely boosted the frame rates across all laptops. Anyway, rounding out gaming, it's not the MacBook's strongest suit. You can get a much better gaming experience with a Windows laptop, particularly at this price point.
Let's talk about AI. If you plan to do that on your laptop, we tested the standard Wolf Goat Cabbage test on a 14 billion parameter model. We use the same random seed for each of these laptops. You can clearly see a huge jump up in performance for the new M5 Pros from the M4 Pros. This is one of the biggest areas where the M5 Pros improve on that older chip. Once again, there isn't much of a difference between the M5 Pro 16 core GPU and the 20 core one. But jumping up from the M5 chip, the base one that is, to an M5 Pro, that makes a big difference. At the other end of the scale, this is one of the few areas where we do see the larger MacBook Pro 16 with its Max chip outperform that same chip in the 14. The extra power that the 16 can feed its Max chip is clearly paying off here. That being said, this doesn't happen with the Pro chip. Both the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 with a pro chip, the identical one that is, they perform around the same.
Compared to Windows laptops, the 5070 Ti in the Zephorus G16, it performs similar to an M5 Pro MacBook Pro. That being said, we have certainly seen 5080 laptops go for the same price as these, and they perform much better. In fact, they also have more VRAM, which is what AI people need.
Okay, now let's take a look at raw CPU performance. Each of Apple's M5 chips have a mix of cores. The M5 chip has a mix of super cores and efficient ones. The M5 Pro and Maxes, they have more cores and they do dump those efficient cores for performance ones. I put all the specs on screen, but guys, let's just dive in and see how they actually perform. Geekbench tests a variety of common performance tasks that you may do on your laptop. Here you can see that the MacBook Pros with the Max chips, they don't perform that much better than the 18 core Pro chip. That's because their CPU is identical. The only difference is faster memory bandwidth. There is a small drop in performance. The M5 Pro 15 corporate guys calling a spade a spade. These new Apple chips, they smash the performance of competitors that are in similarsized Windows laptops. If you are coming from an M4 Pro, not a big jump in performance here, but it is massive from the M3 Pro or earlier.
Let's take a look at Cinebench as that really pushes these laptops to their limits and it better shows up some of their differences. There are a couple of additional takeaways here. Firstly, you can see that these CPUs when placed in the larger MacBook Pro 16s, they do perform a little better. We also now see a little more of a gap between the M5 Pro 15 core and the 18 core. That 15 core Pro chip, it does beat the M4 Pro by a little bit, but keep in mind this is the faster of the two M4 Pro chips compared to the lower of the two M5 Pro chips. So, you really need to compare it to the 18 core M5 Pro. When it comes to Intel and AMD, it's a bit of a sorry story.
To delve in deeper, we ran loop for 10 minutes, essentially a torture test to analyze their power efficiency. We put them on a scatter plot here. You want to see as much performance as possible for as little power draw as possible. We're referring to average power draw here over the duration of this test. As you can see, Apple completely annihilates the competition when you're doing something that requires performance. Now compare that to what you saw earlier from our battery life test. Windows laptops, they were competitive, but that is for basic tasks. In this context, it's not even fair. All these M5 chips, by the way, when in MacBook Pro 14s, they do follow the same straight line as the M4 Pro chip before them. That means their efficiency, at least in this test, is unchanged.
Stacking the processors against each other, these new MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and Max chips, they initially burst quite high but they actually average much lower power draw. This is something we've seen in Intel laptops before, but it's kind of new for Apple's chips. In this graph, you can clearly see the MacBook Pro 16s, they're able to feed their respective chips around 15 W more. You can see that the power efficiency, it kind of diminishes a little bit by doing that. The line curves off.
So, let's see how this all plays out when it comes to heat and fan noise. During light use, all the MacBook Pros remain cool to the touch and they were dead silent. When doing creative workloads like editing one of our videos or playing games, all of them were silent, but they did feel warm. It wasn't uncomfortable, but I certainly noticed it. Apple, they just massively prioritize a silent laptop over a cool filling one. The base MacBook Pro 14 with the M5 chip that uses a single fan cooling solution. The ones with the M5 Pro and Max chips, they use a more robust dual fan setup. Now, on those models, I normally install the Max Fan Control app just to bump up the fans a little. Not so much that they're audible, but enough to keep the chassis feeling cool. By the way, I haven't actually found that works well on the base model. It single fan solution, it just isn't enough to really make a dent. Also, right now, the app, the Max Fan Control app, it just isn't working on these newer M5 Pro and Max models, but hopefully it will be updated soon.
All right, to truly see what is going on, we measured thermals and fan noise during that 10-minute Cinebench stress test that I talked about earlier. We do measure internal temps which show that all these MacBooks, they throttle a little bit after the first 90 seconds. Surprisingly, the more performant chips, they actually keep their CPUs cooler. Perhaps Apple is keeping some thermal headroom for their beefier GPUs as this is a CPU only test, but realistically, they should adapt. When it comes to the worst case for temps you actually feel, the M5 Max MacBook Pro 14, it is the hottest of the bunch, which is kind of what we expected. It hits an absolutely bonkers 50° C on the keyboard deck. The M5 Pro models weren't that much better either. These new MacBooks, they may be more powerful than the older M3 Pro one, for example, but boy, do they get hotter. You can see here just how much cooler gaming laptops and Dell's XPS is. Even the tiny Zephris G14 gaming laptop, which I've complained at length, is a very warm feeling laptop. It feels cooler when under a max load. Realistically, if you're planning to push a MacBook to its limits, you really should be buying a MacBook Pro 16, not a 14.
Now, during this stress test, you can definitely hear the fans going, but these MacBooks are quieter than gaming laptops. The loudest being the base M5 model. It has to spin that single fan a lot to keep it cool.
Rounding out the changes, memory bandwidth received a bump up this year. You've already seen its effects factored into the results I've showed you. Storage also received a bump up this year. I've seen reviewers just rave about this. Honestly guys, it really doesn't matter. Once you go above a certain speed, storage, it just isn't the bottleneck. I don't know how many people are copying and pasting a very large file from one spot on the MacBook to another. Seriously, I I just don't think it's that useful.
If you're copying files to and from your MacBook via Wi-Fi, though, you may have been excited to hear that these new MacBooks have Wi-Fi 7. I certainly was. But unfortunately, it's a let down. Apple's N1 chip, it only uses the 160 MHz channel on the 6 GHz band. It doesn't use the faster 320 MHz channel, so we were only able to see a slight performance increase versus last year's models. We've seen far better results on Windows laptops that support the full Wi-Fi 7 spec.
All right, so I've covered what's changed. I'm just going to finish off with my general thoughts on the rest of the laptop. In 2026, it's starting to feel a bit dated. It's quite chunky and heavy for a 14-in laptop. I don't mind that for the more powerful variants, but for the one with the M5 chip, it should be thinner and lighter. I just think Apple should merge, you know, the Airline and the base pro. I'd like to see a MacBook Air 14 that has a better screen than the current Air does.
And talking of screens, the notch on the MacBook Pro 14, it's still ridiculously large. It really needs to go on a diet. That being said, in everyday use, I don't really notice it. Also, it's time to have curved edges. The edges of these MacBooks, they're pretty darn sharp, and they can cut into your wrist. That's if you're using one on a plane or somewhere where you don't have adequate support for your arms. Also, there does seem to be a little bit of variance in the keyboards between our units. Our MacBook Pro with the base M5 chip, it feels slightly lower travel and a little less comfortable to type on. Furthermore, on most MacBook Pro 14s, the spacebar seems ever so slightly taller than the command key next to it. From some angles, this can cause me to get my thumb caught on its edge, which is a little annoying. Ultimately, these have a good keyboard, but it's nowhere near the best in 2026.
Finally, pricing. It may seem that these MacBooks have higher starting prices, but in fact, they really don't. That's because they now start with more storage. Take last year. If you were looking to buy the cheapest MacBook Pro 14 with an M4 Pro chip, but you wanted 1 TB of storage, you were either forced to buy it custom from Apple, which means you would miss out on a sale, as Apple doesn't discount their laptops, or you could buy it from a retailer, where you could take advantage of a sale. But for those models with higher storage, they would come bundled with a more powerful CPU, which you may not need, but you were forced to pay for. With these new ones, you can now just buy the base models, which now come with the appropriate amount of storage for their respective chips. Take the Max chips. Many of those buyers are working on large video files. I personally wanted 2 TB in mine, but I absolutely wasn't prepared to pay Apple for it and get a custom config. as at a retailer on those more expensive MacBooks, the sales are pretty big, often $300 to $400 off. So, I'm glad that the stock configs now start with more storage.
On that note, do check out our website, bestlaptop.dals. Over there, we track prices right across retailers, so you know which are currently offering the best deals. If you don't find these laptops on sale at the time you're going to buy, just set a custom price drop notification. I'd recommend $150 or more off on the Pro models and $300 or more off on the Max models.
So, let's wrap. Apple's MacBook Pros are fantastic if you can afford one and you aren't gaming or at least not AAA gaming as most of them don't run on these. If you don't need that much performance, I'd go for the M5 base model. It has the longest battery life and it's the most affordable. The vast majority of power users though, they should get the M5 Pro 15 core. The only people who should really upgrade to say the Max chip, those are the people who are doing intensive video editing, 3D rendering, or AI development. Anything that just can take advantage of those extra GPU cores and the extra media engine.
If you want to know which I'm going to keep, I'm actually leaning towards the MacBook Pro 14 with a max chip this year. Previous years, I'd kept the Pro chip. This kind of surprised me. I actually thought I'd lose too much performance by getting that chip in the smaller 14-in chassis, and I thought it would get way too hot to the touch. But in the real world, it actually doesn't. At least not for my use case. It's kind of a miracle device to have so much power having the Max chip in such a small chassis.
Well, that's all I got for you. Do get subscribed with that notification bell on because we have a lot more exciting reviews coming. We've got the new MacBook Pro 16s right around the corner and then we've actually got a lot of competitors to the MacBooks like Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i, their more compact Pro 9i, and the new Razer Blade 16. Actually guys, I want to end with a personal ask. We are so close to hitting 400,000 subscribers. Please give us a hand. It would just make the whole team feel so proud of their achievement. Till next time, go do something awesome with your day and I will catch you later.