Apple takes wraps off new MacBook Pro laptops with M5 Pro and M5 Max processors

Apple has followed the announcements of the iPhone 17e and iPad Air earlier this week with another handful of unveilings today. It has, at last, rounded out the M5 MacBook Pro range of laptops with M5 Pro and M5 Max models, plus there’s a new version of the Apple Studio Monitor and an M5 MacBook Air.

If you want to read about the M5 MacBook Air, we’ve covered that in a separate article. Here, I’m only going to talk about the MacBook Pro laptops.

This is not the first M5 MacBook Pro Apple has released, of course. The 14in M5 MacBook Pro was first announced on 15 October 2025, some four and a half months ago. But this is the first time we’ve seen the Pro and Max variants of the chips in a commercially available machine.

It’s also the first time any version of the larger 16in MacBook Pro will be available on M5 silicon. The MacBook Pro M5, however, will remain restricted to the 14in size.

How fast will the Apple M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro laptops be?

Apple says the M5 Pro MacBook Pro is built – surprise, surprise – from the ground up with AI in mind. Unlike the old M4 Pro/Max chips, the M5 Pro/Max separates the GPU and CPU dies to provide a significant bump in performance.

The most powerful variant of the new chips inside the latest MacBook Pros have 18 CPU cores, made up of six “super cores” and 12 performance cores to deliver what Apple claims is 30 per cent faster overall performance compared with the M4 Pro-powered MacBook Pro.

The processors’ integrated GPUs, meanwhile, have up to 20 cores that deliver up to 50% higher performance than the M4 Pro and M4 Max laptops. And, just like the previously released M5 chip, these have “neural accelerators” embedded into each of their cores, designed to accelerate AI workloads such as local LLM processing, and local AI text and image generation.

The new laptops also benefit from an increase in memory bandwidth, with the M5 Pro delivering up to 307GB/sec from up to 64GB of RAM, while the M5 Max can shunt data around at a whopping 614GB/sec.

That’s not all, however. The new laptops also deliver up to double the storage speed compared to the previous generation of MacBook Pro/Max, with speeds topping out at an impressive 14.5GB/sec. And there’s also more base storage as standard here, with the Pro and the Max starting at 1TB compared with 512GB of storage in the previous model. Worth noting as well is that the standard M5 14in MacBook Pro I reviewed is also getting a storage capacity boost, up from 51GB to 1TB.

There’s also up to 24-hour battery life, a Liquid Retina XDR display with up to 1,600 nits peak brightness for HDR content. Three Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, meanwhile, provide support for high-speed data storage, and you can connect up to two “high-resolution” displays with the M5 Pro and four with the M5 Max.

M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro: How much will they cost?

The new MacBook Pros might well provide a big performance boost this year and more storage, but unfortunately, they’re also significantly more expensive, with the base 14in M5 Pro MacBook Pro costing £200 more than the 14in M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and the cheapest 14in MacBook Pro with M5 Max starting at £3,599, up from £3,199.

Here’s a breakdown of the prices for both the 14in and 15in models:

• 14in MacBook Pro with M5 Pro: from £2,199
• 16in MacBook Pro with M5 Pro: from £2,699
• 14in MacBook Pro with M5 Max: from£3,599
• 16in MacBook Pro with M5 Max: from £3,899
• 14in MacBook Pro with M5: from £1,699

Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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