Transcription
Let's get this out of the way right now. The M5 is about 20% faster than the M4 in CPU performance and roughly 30% faster in GPU workloads. There, now you know everything you came here for and you can click away satisfied.
Except you won't, because lurking in the comments of every Apple Silicon video, mine included, is a growing chorus. Apple Silicon is boring now. Performance gains are incremental. The form factor hasn't changed in years. Where's the excitement? Where's the revolution? And do you know what? Even though I suck at voices, they're right. Apple Silicon, it is boring. But you see, I think that's fantastic.
See, I think we've collectively forgotten what an absolute dumpster fire the Mac was before Apple Silicon. If you're complaining that year over year performance bumps are predictable and unexciting, then you've definitely forgotten what it was like year over year when bumps were anything but guaranteed, and when the ones we did get came with huge caveats that would make an ad for big pharma blush.
Now, let me paint you a picture of the Mac in the late 2010s, back before this YouTube channel fell off. In 2013, Apple unveiled the trashcan Mac Pro. You remember this thing, the gorgeous cylindrical thermal core design that Phil Schiller promised would be upgradable and modular, but wasn't. By 2017, it had gone four years without an update, no spec bump, no price drop, nothing. Because of this thing, Apple's most powerful computers were no longer desktops. They were in fact the 2016 MacBook Pros.
And oh boy, those MacBook Pros. In addition to having butterfly keyboards so problematic that Apple would eventually settle a class action lawsuit for $50 million, these machines were thermal disasters. They shipped with 28-watt TDP CPUs, and then discrete GPUs pushing 35 watts on their own, which when paired together with woefully inadequate cooling, set them up to be, as the kids say, I think, cooked. I mean, I was one of the few YouTubers back then experimenting with different thermal pastes and SMC firmware overrides to manually control fan speeds, because the stock fan curves were ridiculous, often not even spinning up the fan until the CPU or GPU crossed 80 degrees celsius, which they would do almost immediately under any real workload. Even my base model 13 inch with an i5 and no discrete GPU from the era could not keep that Intel chip below its 100 degrees celsius T-junction temperature under sustained load in an air conditioned room. It had to thermally throttle. Below its base clock. Not its boost clock, its BASE clock! The 15" models with their dual fan heat pipe designs could theoretically keep either the CPU or the GPU from throttling if you only taxed one or the other. But the moment your workload touched both, which as you know most actual workloads do, the system would fall to its knees.
And on top of all of that thermal misery, Apple made the controversial decision to go all in on USB-C, which sounds great in theory. Universal ports, one cable to rule them all. Except, the ecosystem back then was just a wasteland of expensive, ineffectual dongles that would overheat, disconnect randomly, or just flat out not work.
How lucky we would have been back then to have something like today's sponsor, the iVANKY FusionDock Max 2, the first and only MacBook dock for Thunderbolt 5 that enables native triple display. This thing can drive two 6K displays and one 4K display simultaneously, Not the close the lid workaround, not DisplayLink jank, just three actual proper external monitors. But it's the 23 ports that make this thing genuinely useful: three downstream Thunderbolt ports, multiple USB-C at 10Gbps, USB-A, an SD card slot, Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, even optical audio, basically everything except… floppy drive. And because it's a proper dock, not a dongle, you get 140 watts of power delivery to your MacBook while simultaneously fast charging your phone via the separate 30 watt USB-C port on the front. Now, this thing does have active cooling to keep performance stable even under full load, and it importantly stays cool with its machined metal chassis, which I've seen many docks do not. Honestly, we've had, what, two or three like competing Thunderbolt docks just completely bake themselves to death. This thing is not likely to. And if you don't have Thunderbolt 5, by the way, that's okay because it's backwards compatible with older Apple Silicon MacBooks. So it's time to ditch those dongles if you've still got them. Get rid of that messy desk. There's no excuse anymore. Start running your entire desk off of a single cable going straight to your MacBook. Get your iVANKY FusionDock Max 2 today with the link below.
But look, things didn't get any better after 2016. A year later, Apple and, I guess, Intel brought Kaby Lake, a negligible performance uplift with the same thermals and the same failing keyboard. 2018 gave us Coffee Lake. With more cores, including a 6-core 15-inch model, but throttling and heat often erasing any gains that we were to achieve, and oh, the same keyboard. And then 2019 brought slightly better thermals thanks to a revised heat pipe configuration and an 8-core i9 option, but as I proved in my testing, it just couldn't even often sustain its advertised clock speeds. Just the regular old base clock. And oh yeah, it had the same keyboard.
The only halfway decent machine in this entire lineup was the 16-inch MacBook Pro from late 2019, which replaced the less than six months old 15 inch. It finally fixed the keyboard, reverting to scissor switches, it packed a bigger battery, it had better speakers, and then the i9 9th gen chip was better cooled, and AMD's newest Navi dGPUs were a nice upgrade. But it was insanely heavy and hot, nearly 5 pounds of heft that could double as a space heater, and oh yeah, it was like 5 grand.
And lest you forget, these were the Macs that Apple actually cared about. At least you could say they received some attention from their maker. The rest of the lineup? Forgotten. Neglected. That 2013 Mac Pro was approaching half a decade without updates. The future of Pro Macs looked so bleak that Apple did something they never do. They invited five journalists to a roundtable with top executives and pre-announced a Mac Pro that wouldn't ship for another 32 months. Phil Schiller got as close as Apple has probably ever come to issuing a real apology, saying that the 2013 Mac Pro was not it, and then, And as promised, later that year, the iMac Pro launched as a stopgap for a real Pro desktop. And everyone, including me, just looking for any morsel of stale bread, praised it as excellent. Not because it had mind-blowing performance, but because it existed. A massive portion of the machine's internal volume was dedicated to cooling. And it was the first Apple system that had shipped in basically a decade that had more thermal headroom than the silicon was pushing. It was quiet. It was cool. It was predictable. And it was also $5,000 to start. And the Genius Bar broke mine. Twice.
Value was just non-existent across the entire lineup. By June 2018, every Mac except the iMac Pro had gone more than a year without an update. The Mac Mini was completely ignored. From 2014 to 2018, it didn't even get a price drop. And worse, the 2014 model was in many ways a downgrade from the 2012 model because it moved to solder RAM and it dropped the quad-core i7 option. The base model 21.5" iMac was shipping with a freaking hard drive in August of 2020! A spinning platter hard drive making it feel ancient and slow right out of the box! And the MacBook Air, their best-selling computer, went essentially unchanged for five years with a 5% single core and 15% multi-core improvement from 2013 to 2018. And when Apple did finally ship a retina model in 2018, it used an underpowered Y-series CPU similar thermal constraints and, of course, that bloody mother friggin' butterfly keyboard.
The Mac was in such a dire state for so long that people legitimately wondered if Apple would exit the PC market. It seemed unlikely to me as a fan, but still not impossible, especially given how hard they were pushing the iPad Pro as a computer replacement from 2017 onward.
That's what made the M1 such a revolution. Apple took their most neglected product, the Mac Mini, and their most fatally flawed laptop, the MacBook Air, and gave both of them a chip that was 50% faster than the highest-end 2020 Intel MacBook Air in single-core performance, and literally four times faster in multi-core performance. Oh, and the GPU? Five times faster than Intel's Iris Plus graphics found in the MacBook Air. They did this while providing nearly double the battery life in the same chassis and removing the fan entirely while they were at it. Did you forget that the only Mac without a fan pre-M1 was the MacBook? Yeah, so did I.
While these low-end Macs were the beginning, Apple also proved that it could quickly scale to bigger and better. The M1 Pro and Max delivered 70% more CPU performance on average than the chips they replaced while using 70% less power. The new MacBook Pro chassis was so vastly improved for cooling that the fans barely had to work at all. They often didn't even turn on. And unlike Intel MacBooks, which would dramatically reduce power when unplugged from the wall, the M1 Pro and Max delivered identical, full-throttle performance regardless of their power source. Video editors could render complex 8K projects just as fast in the field as they could at their desk, which at the time was unheard of.
And Apple Silicon also brought software-defined hardware: an NPU, new media engines, ISPs, and more — all offloading work from that monolithic compute, which was very good, to even better specialized chips. And a new unified memory architecture allocated resources dynamically, delivering vastly better dollar-per-dollar graphics performance than anything that the Intel era could provide.
And then Apple did what they proved unable to do in the Intel era: they kept going. M2, M3, M4, each generation brought meaningful improvements, not just to the flagship models, but across the entire lineup: consistent updates, predictable cadence, reliable performance gains. Which brings us to this, five years later, the M5. With three exceptions, every Mac has been updated within the last 12 months. Two of those three exceptions have been updated within the last 13 months. The Mac Pro is the only machine in Apple's entire lineup that has gone neglected, now pushing two and a half years without an update. But with the Mac Studio now existing and the Pro's limited utility given PCIe expansion is basically restricted to add-on cards, I'm not too worried. Even the iMac, updated just this last year with M4, is in the Mac Rumors Do Not Buy category because it will almost assuredly get the M5 soon. Almost every Mac model has received almost every chip generation, something that was completely unfathomable just five years ago.
How does this M5 stack up? Well, I benchmarked this MacBook Pro against my M4 Mac Mini and M4 MacBook Air, which each has more and less thermal headroom, respectively. Multi-core performance is 20% higher in both real-world and synthetic tests. Single-core gains sit at around 15 to 17%. GPU improvements are even more dramatic, a 35% average increase in synthetic benchmarks. Gaming shows even bigger gains thanks to improved ray tracing and enhanced shader cores. I mean, Death Stranding runs at 4K max settings, no frame generation, no upscaling, no MetalFX, just standard bog 4K max, holding at around 40 frames per second. You can now game shockingly well on a base model MacBook Pro, and that is something that even in the Apple Silicon era, I have not been able to say. Also this year, massive improvements to the neural engine with near two times performance gains in AI tasks for local LLMs and image generation. And increased memory bandwidth and PCIe 5 equivalent SSDs are three times faster than the SSDs found in M4. In short, this is an insane amount of computer for $1600. I mean, this base spec machine universally outperforms the four-year-old $4000 M1 Ultra found in the Mac Studio.
We are seeing a 30% year-over-year improvement on average, where we were previously thrilled to get maybe 5-15% after two or three years. We were so battered and brainwashed by the Intel era that any improvement felt like a gift. And now we're sitting here calling these updates unexciting? I mean, M5 has literally exceeded double the speed of the base M1 launched just five years ago. Over that same five year period, the MacBook Pro in the Intel era from 2014 to 2019, which saw the biggest five year performance increase from any computer in the lineup, managed just 75% improvement. We're talking 240% gains versus 75%. That is not incremental, that is generational.
I originally planned to write this video criticizing the M5 MacBook Pro for continuing to be in this weird position. When compared to an M4 MacBook Air available for literally half the price, the value proposition gets pretty murky, and by the time you upgrade the RAM and storage to match what will be the M5 Pro that will ship in just a few months, the math gets even stranger. This computer kind of doesn't make sense, but it also kind of doesn't matter, because I'm mostly just in awe of what we've come to take for granted. This machine is massively better than the M1. It's better than the M4. This represents a larger single-generation performance jump than any Intel era update.
But here's the thing: most people with M1 Macs don't feel the urgency to upgrade. Not because these improvements aren't real, but because the M1 was so good, so capable, that it's still more than sufficient for the vast majority of users five years later. That is the opposite of the Intel era, where you practically had to upgrade every single cycle to even keep up. And frankly, as someone who came up in that era of tearing apart a brand new $5,000 laptop to eke out just another minute or two sustained performance before the assured thermal throttling event? Well, this couldn't be a better change. I'm glad this silicon is boring. Boring means predictable. Boring has proven to mean reliable. Boring means you can buy an M5 Mac today and still be happy with it in 2030 and probably beyond.
But just because the silicon is boring doesn't mean the rest of the hardware needs to be. This form factor is getting a little bit long in the tooth. The display, while excellent, really deserves to be OLED. The battery should be silicon carbon. The webcam certainly ought to be better. And while we don't have much thermal headroom in the current chassis, changes could be made to offer even better cooling in more compact designs. But if you had shown me this computer a decade ago, hell, if you'd shown it to me five years ago, I wouldn't have believed this to be possible. Much less a reality sitting right here on this table and on store shelves for $1600. And that's, honestly, that's good enough for me. Thanks so much for watching, and as always, Stay snazzy.