MacBook Pro M5 Review: Apple’s Most Powerful Pro Laptop Yet

I’ve been reviewing gadgets for many years and with each new release by the MacBook guys there is the same level of breathless marketing. Best ever, revolutionary, designed for pros. All the words had lost their meaning to me, I heard them so many times. Then for a month I used the MacBook Pro M5, and I’m stuck with some of those cynical thoughts.

This is NOT a spec sheet walkthrough. I don’t want you to even know the actual number of transistors. What I can tell you is what it actually felt like when I was sitting with this laptop for 30 days, writing, editing, doing research, taking phone calls from home, sitting in cafés, working on planes, etc. That’s what genuinely surprised me. Yes, the things that still irked me.

First Impressions: The Box, the Weight, the Feel

As soon as I took the MacBook Pro out of its (now completely fiber based) box, I thought, it’s the same laptop. If you handed me this & an M4 Pro, I would have a moment to physically distinguish them, as they are built of solid aluminum, Space Black finish, and have MagSafe ports.

It is not a criticism. The shape factor is very near to optimum. The 14 inch is just over 3.5 lbs and fits in a bag. The hinge glides easily and it doesn’t move at all. The keyboard is still the best that I have ever written on and for a guy who writes thousands of words per week, it’s more of a benchmark than anything else.

What felt different was turning it on. The feeling of the M5 is so immediate and yet so difficult to describe. When pressed, the apps appear before your finger actually leaves the trackpad. There was just no time when the machine asked me to wait, as I was switching tabs from 15 open tabs to two research documents, Notion and a video in the background.

Specifications of MacBook Pro M5

The Display: I Tested It in a Sunlit Café and a Pitch-Black Room

One of my deliberate tests was taking this laptop to the same coffee shop two days in a row, one in the morning when the sun shines right through the window and another in the evening, when the only light comes from the warm, dim overhead lamps.

The Liquid Retina XDR display performed very well in both cases. Under optimal sunlight, it can eject up to 1,000 nits for standard content (I tested it against Apple’s spec sheet) which is enough for me to read the screen without cupping my hands around it like I’m hiding a campfire.

The display was also dimmer at night, which wasn’t too distracting, and when reading long documents late in the evening, the low-brightness mode was actually comfortable. Apple rated the panel all the way to 1 nit in dark environments and I trust them, as my eyes didn’t strain.

To test HDR video, I pulled up a nature documentary on Apple TV+ and played it on the panel at the maximum brightness specification that Apple has tested (1,600 nits). High contrast pictures like lightning on a dark ocean were truly amazing. I haven’t seen anything so good on any other laptop screen. The 1,000,000:1 contrast is no marketing gimmick, it’s what you see.

One of those features that you don’t realize you needed until you try a 60Hz screen. When you’re scrolling through a 5000 word document or swiping between apps, it’s like a piece of paper is glued to your fingers. After 1 month, it seems as though you’re walking through syrup with a regular display.

The Audio: I Played Music, Watched Film, and Sat on Calls

I’m opening up a little bit here, laptop speakers get the “good enough” treatment from me in general. They did not.

I did a deliberate audio test, 3 tracks for each category. An acoustic recording with a piano focus, a bass driven hip-hop record and a film score. I initially listened to each of them through the MacBook Pro’s six speaker system with Spatial Audio, then switched to an external speaker for comparison.

It was the width of the sound stage that caught my eye. The audio was real, and from a space that was bigger than the laptop itself, when sitting 18 inches away from the screen. Bass was there and was not bloated but if you’re looking for a subwoofer experience, then you need to recalibrate. This is a laptop.

This was particularly interesting about the Spatial Audio behavior in Dolby Atmos content. I switched on a movie that used to be known for its audio visual effects and let it go. The audio panning was organic and not gimmicky.

The studio quality 3 mic array was evident for video calling. I do that at least for 2 hours a day while I’m at work. Two colleagues in turn said that my sound was clearer and more present than it ever was before. No external mic. No interface. Subsequently, just the built in array in a more moderate room.

The Camera: Real-World Zoom Calls, Not Just Demos

The 12MP Center Stage webcam is good. But it’s the best built in webcam for a laptop I’ve ever used, certainly not a mirrorless camera good.

I tried it using natural window light, overhead office fluorescent light and low evening light. The tones were true and the picture was good enough that I didn’t have to apologize for having to be on a laptop camera in natural light. It resisted well under light conditions, noise was visible but not distracting.

One of those things that you don’t need until you have a big call with a lot of movement, and then you realize that Center Stage is great. After a week or so, I did not think about it anymore. Simply, it helped me to stay focused. As I walked into the room with a second person to demo with, it expanded immediately without my asking it to, to accommodate both of us

Desk View is more niche, if you’re a teacher who shows physical products on video or anything with a hands on demo, then this is really clever. This wide-angle view warps the front camera’s field of view to display your desk surface from a top down angle without requiring a second camera.

The Battery: I Tried to Kill It

This was the hardest challenge I ever encountered and my aim was to make it as difficult as possible for it.

The battery life for the M5 is claimed by Apple as up to 24 hours, with video streaming in Safari at medium or low brightness. I had a lot worse conditions: brightness at 70%, 4 browser tabs open, with one video stream playing on it, Notion open, Spotify playing background music and Bluetooth enabled. At that weight, I was fairly consistent on three test days with 14 to 16 hours. That’s not 24, but that’s the highest possible video streaming number for Apple. 

The point was I stopped thinking about my battery anymore. The mental burden of looking at the percentage, searching for outlets at airports, all that was gone. I opened the laptop and closed it at the end of my six hour train ride. It went from 85% to 49%. 

Another handy feature is the fast charge, which can charge 50% in around 30 minutes. This testing was done twice with a completely drained battery. After the first time I reached 50% in 25-30 minutes on the included 96W MagSafe charger, I reached 100% on the second attempt in 45-48 minutes.

Performance in Daily Work: The Benchmarks and the Reality

I’m using Geekbench 6 on the M5 model, and got roughly 3,900 single-core and 15,100 multi-core, which is on par with the results that reviewers such as The Verge and Tom’s Hardware have been reporting. However, there’s more to it than raw numbers.

According to Apple’s own benchmark data, the M5 is 6.8x faster than the M1 when it comes to rendering in Blender, and 4.1x faster when it comes to AI speech enhancement in Adobe Premiere Pro. I did not run those same tests but I took a 45-minute audio interview file from Premiere and ran it through the Enhance Speech feature. It took me the time to make coffee.

The key feature of this generation is the Apple Intelligence. The Neural Accelerators in each GPU core make it no longer a favor to the machine to create images or to run a local LLM in applications such as LM Studio. Quickly.

40 tabs open in the browser, multiple Google Docs, video playing in the background, sometimes Photoshop, Slack, zoom. I never had a problem. Not once in 30 days did I see the spinning beachball.

What I’d Change

It’s impossible to write a proper review without this section. I still don’t like the notch aesthetically. I know it has a camera and you might not see it after an hour but it still bothers me.

The opening price is an actual evaluation. It’s a high quality laptop and it’s priced accordingly. If your work doesn’t require hardware, the MacBook Air M5 does many of those things for much less.

If the outlet is not right next to your desk, the MagSafe cable (also in the box) will be too short for comfortable desk use. A small thing but annoying.

MacBook Pro M5 Scoreboard

Final Verdict

The MacBook Pro M5 is not the kind of computer that makes you feel smart when purchasing it. This is a laptop that seamlessly gets away without attracting attention, and simply takes care of everything you throw at it. The exhibition is superb. I had no idea how realistic this battery was going to be! The speakers and microphone are among the best of their built-in laptop counterparts. The performance is so high that you are actually future proofed.

If you’re hard on your feet, hard on the road and don’t want something to get in your way, this is for you. 

If you are not in Apple ecosystem: Read

• Dell XPS 14,
• HP OmniBook Ultra 14,
• Dell XPS vs HP OmniBook Ultra
• ASUS ZenBook S14.