Ever since introducing Apple Silicon, the Apple MacBook Pro has been an easy recommendation for anyone in the market for a laptop, whether that be for browsing the web or one that is to be used as a workhorse for high-end video production or gaming, and the new M5 chip that is in the base MacBook Pro pus Apple so far ahead of the competition that it isn’t even funny.
For the most part, this is a near identical device to the M4 MacBook Pro which isn’t a bad thing at all, as that was already a fantastic value-for-money laptop with some incredible improvements, and the M5 chip simply just focuses on the internals to keep the MacBook Pro ahead of the game.
The screen still has the Liquid Retina XDR display that can reach up to 1600 nits of peak brightness in HDR, but now it can also reach 1000 nits of sustained brightness when viewing SDR content which does go a long way. I once again have the version with the nano-texture display which I absolutely love for the way that it gets rid of glare, and means that you can take your MacBook Pro absolutely anywhere without losing vibrancy.
Just like last year, the base M5 MacBook Pro comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, where in previous years it had only come with three so that’s much appreciated. The rest of the port offering is still the same including a HDMI port, MagSafe as well as an SD card reader.
You’re still getting that same 12MP webcam, which I still feel could be a tad better, but it’s going to be more than serviceable for your everyday video calls and the Center Stage feature does a great job of keeping you in frame and is fairly consistent across Apple’s entire device range now.
The M5 MacBook Pro still offers up to 24 hours of battery life, and honestly, it will blow you away, especially if coming from an Intel MacBook or literally any other laptop on the market. Even when putting it through its paces with the most intense tasks, battery life was ticking down incredibly slowly and it will absolutely get you through a full day (if not multiple) without thinking about your charger.
As the name suggests, you now get the M5 chip and whilst the M4 chip was super impressive and more than fine for most people, really, this is a laptop for those still holding into their Intel Macs or coming over from Windows laptop, and now is a great time to do just that.
The M5 chip is 3.5x faster than the M4 chip with 1.6x faster graphics with enhanced shader cores and a third ray tracing engine built-into the GPU and you now get neural engines built into all 10 cores of the GPU as well which makes AI tasks faster.
I put this through its paces by playing Cyberpunk 2077 which is the most graphically intensive game on the market, and runs like an absolute dream on the M5 MacBook Pro. I was able to push the game to close to 60 FPS using MetalFX upscaling (now Metal 4 with MetalFX Frame Interpolation) and the game looks and runs absolutely phenomenally without missing a beat. I posted a video with the M4 Max running Cyberpunk 2077 and people refused to believe that this was possible locally, but it’s not only possible but it’s a fantastic experience on the M5 MacBook Pro.
I really hope that we start to see more games in addition to the likes of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Dead Island 2 because it’s very, very clear that the MacBook Pro is a gaming powerhouse and there’s absolutely no reason why more games can’t come to the platform.
The other major improvement to the internals comes in the way of faster storage with read and write speeds of up to 2x faster compared to the M4 MacBook Pro and again, this isn’t going to be something that everyday users notice or were longing for, but this comes at no greater cost, so again if you’re updating from an older Mac, the value for money that you’re getting with the M5 MacBook Pro is unmatched.
Obviously the other big chance to Mac this year is macOS Tahoe which brings the Liquid Glass design which looks absolutely stunning on this display, but there’s also massive improvements for gamers with the new Games mac bringing together all of your games in one place, but it also goes one step further to the Game Mode introduced last year with Game Overlay.
This is a way to quickly manage your connected controller, friend list as well as things such as volume and display brightness and again as a massive gamer and a long-life Apple fan warms my heart to see Apple’s commitment to gaming.