To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- Beautifully solid build
- Great all round performance and battery life
- Price the same as last year’s M4
- RAM and storage prices are expensive
- Still no OLED option
The M5 MacBook Pro is, on the face of it, a fairly run-of-the-mill update for Apple’s professional lineup of laptops. From the outside, it looks exactly like its predecessor, and in nearly every department, the specifications are the same.
Of course, under the skin, there’s a new M5 processor with some significant updates. But with not even the price shifting this time around, you could be forgiven for wondering if Apple should have bothered.
What you need to know
I could, at this point, direct you to my review of the M4 MacBook Pro from last year, run some benchmarks and be done with it. I could, but I won’t, because the changes that Apple has made to the M5 processor are significant.
And you probably won’t be surprised to discover that the driving force behind the changes is AI. However, this is not the sort of AI you might be familiar with, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Instead, Apple is banking on the laptops of the future needing to process AI tools locally without needing to send personal or corporate data up to the cloud. As a result, it has integrated neural accelerator units into each core of its M5 GPU, boosting performance for this type of task by a claimed 3.5x over the M4.
That’s significant because this sort of computing task is not going away. Increasingly, we’re seeing professional software tools such as DaVinci Resolve and Logic Pro use this technology to add capabilities and accelerate new ones, and improving performance in these areas is important.
However, it’s also important to serve existing users with traditional computing needs with the usual performance upgrades, and that is indeed what the M5 MacBook Pro delivers. It’s the same as last year’s laptops, just faster.
In fact, the biggest difference between this year’s MacBook Pro and last year’s is what’s missing: there is, so far at least, no M5 Pro or M5 Ultra version of the MacBook Pro, and there’s no 16in model, either. If you desperately want to move to M5 silicon, then the 14in model is all there is.
Price and competition
This means there’s less to cover than usual when it comes to the models available to buy, but at least there’s no price hike. The cheapest 14in M5 MacBook Pro this year remains £1,599, which gets you 16GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD. That’s still a fairly stingy specification considering the asking price. If you want more memory, the price rises steeply: for 24GB, add £200, while 32GB is an additional £200.
Upgrading to a 1TB SSD piles on yet more cash – another £200 – while a 2TB SSD adds £400 to the base price. And if you want a 4TB drive, that adds £1,000. As with all MacBook purchases, it’s important to factor in these prices when comparing with Windows machines, because those will typically come with more generous base specifications.
Take the Honor MagicBook Pro 14in, which is our favourite laptop so far in 2025. The model we reviewed in June 2025 came absolutely stacked with hardware – 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and Intel’s top-end Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and yet the price when reviewed was a meagre £1,299 (and at the time of writing this had been reduced to £930). You want that amount of RAM and storage in the M5 MacBook Pro? Be prepared to spend £2,199 – and that won’t even get you an OLED display.
Of course, the MagicBook doesn’t have the all-round capabilities of the M5 MacBook Pro 14in. It doesn’t look or feel quite as nice, and it doesn’t have the same build quality, but you’re getting a lot more laptop for your money in terms of raw specification.
Design
The MacBook Pro is a beautifully crafted device, but there’s no big news there. It hasn’t changed since 2021, and there’s no reason for it to. I’d perhaps prefer it to be slimmer and lighter, but for a workstation laptop, it’s delightfully compact and solid.
Its aluminium chassis is mostly made from recycled materials these days, which is nice, and it comes in either Space Black or silver colourways, both of which are impressively resistant to picking up greasy fingerprints.
It’s even quite well-equipped when it comes to ports and sockets. You get two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 connectors on the left between the 3.5mm audio jack and the MagSafe 3 charging port, plus another single Thunderbolt 4 connector on the right between an SDXC card slot and an HDMI 2.1 output.
One thing to note is that, just like last year’s M4 MacBook Pro, the regular M5 model is not equipped with Thunderbolt 5; that’s restricted to the M4 Pro and M4 Max machines, which can still be purchased. This is a disappointment, but given Thunderbolt 5 drives are still pretty thin on the ground – and expensive – and Thunderbolt 4 storage is still quick enough (up to 40Gbits/sec) for most purposes, it’s not a disaster.
Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
Otherwise, the MacBook Pro is, as ever, pretty brilliant ergonomically. Ever since the butterfly switch era, the MacBook Pro’s keyboards have delivered the perfect balance of travel, feedback, solidity and comfort, and this one is no different.
The layout is sensible, aside from the half-height cursor keys, and there’s no touchbar running along the top any more (I actually quite liked that feature, but there’s no denying it hurt battery life).
The Force Touch trackpad remains among the best in the industry. It’s spacious and sensitive, and the haptic engine behind the glass means you can click anywhere on its surface, even right along the top edge and still have your clicks register. I’d still like a touchscreen to complement the touchpad, but that seems a distant, forlorn hope at this point.
The webcam is a 12MP “Centre Stage” unit that can cleverly frame your face and track it as you shift around in your seat, and image quality is excellent. But those concerned with privacy will be concerned that there’s no privacy shutter, nor any means of toggling the camera on and off quickly. You have to delve into the settings to enable or disable it, which is far from ideal.
Display and audio
In addition to its long-standing aversion to touchscreens, Apple still hasn’t gone over to OLED just yet on its MacBook Pro, either, which I think is a missed opportunity. If you spend this much on a Windows machine, that’s one choice you’ll almost certainly get to make. And it’s not as if Apple doesn’t have access to the technology: the tandem OLED screen in its iPad Pro is superb.
Not that the 120Hz 14.2in Liquid Retina XDR display you get on this MacBook Pro is bad, though, especially if you choose the Nano Texture coating for £150 extra. The sample Apple loaned to me for this review was equipped with this matte coating, and it’s an absolute revelation. It’s fantastic at defeating reflections from any kind of overhead light sources, although do be aware that, if the light is really bright, it does slightly reduce the sense of contrast.
And, technically, this screen is brilliant. Like all MacBook Pro displays, it comes precalibrated from the factory to various colour standards, and it ticks pretty much all the boxes a professional creative could need. It’s sharp, with a resolution of 3,024 x 1,964. It’s vibrant, covering 99% of the P3 colour space, and colour-accurate, too. In the standard Apple XDR Display (P3-1600 nits) mode, I measured it against the Calman Colorchecker selection of colour patches, and it returned an average delta E error of 1.19.
It’s super bright, too, so great for use on set or outdoors. It’s rated at a peak brightness of 1,600 nits during HDR playback and 1,000 nits for SDR content. I wasn’t able to persuade it to hit those peaks in my testing, but with a 10% white window against a black background, I saw it reach 1,055cd/m2, which is pretty darned good for a laptop. The native contrast ratio is very good, at a measured 9,871:1.
Either way, this is a super display with enough accuracy, brightness and anti-reflectivity to be used by creative professionals in any environment you care to mention.
The audio side of things is impressive. The six-speaker surround system produces an astonishingly loud, yet broad and full sound; I measured it at 80dBA against a pink noise source from a metre away, which is better than anything I’ve ever heard any other laptop produce. And the “studio” microphones are remarkable, too.
From podcasters who might have left their big microphone at home to YouTubers in need of a quick, emergency voiceover, the built-in mics are good enough to help you out of an audio jam. Apple has even added a basic noise gate feature to the Voice memo app in macOS 26, which helps cut out extraneous background noise for quick audio recordings.
Performance and battery life
The new Apple M5 chip inside the MacBook Pro is its entire raison d’etre. It has 10 CPU cores, split across 4 performance and 6 efficiency cores, and it has a 10-core GPU, with each of those cores including what Apple calls a “neural accelerator”, designed to boost the performance of local AI processes.
These are not aimed at making stuff like ChatGPT or Gemini faster – those AI services run on vast server farms and require an internet connection. Instead, Apple’s neural accelerators are aimed at people running AI-based tools – for instance, DaVinci Resolve’s Magic Mask tool – businesses running AI tools like summarisation and search on sensitive, private data who don’t want that information leaking out online, or anyone who might need to run large LLMs locally. Of course, you can also use it to accelerate Apple’s own Apple Intelligence tools, although this isn’t likely to be the prime use case right now.
Before I get to the AI testing, though, let’s take a quick browse through our regular benchmarks. These reveal that – surprise, surprise – the M5 MacBook Pro is slightly faster than the M4 model I tested last year. It gained an overall score of 435 in our media conversion benchmarks versus 395 for the M4, and it was a hair quicker than the Honor MagicBook Pro, which packs a Core Ultra 9 285H CPU.
The Geekbench 6 CPU test saw similar improvements overall, but it’s only when you get to the GPU benchmarks do you see a marked improvement. In the GPU OpenCL test, there’s an uplift of 27% over the M4, which is significant. The M5 still lags some way behind Nvidia-powered laptops like the Dell XPS 16 we reviewed in 2024, however, which had an RTX 4070 on board.
This level of performance was reflected in the simple text- and image-generation AI benchmark I put together using Python. This isn’t the most demanding AI workload, admittedly, but it does suggest the M5 still has some way to go, AI-wise, in the performance stakes.
It completed the test in an average total of around 23 seconds, while the RTX 4070 machine completed it in around half the time. That’s not completely surprising given the generation-old RTX 4070 is rated at around 321 TOPS for AI processes, though.
I don’t have an M4 MacBook Pro on hand for comparison, unfortunately, but it is considerably faster than the M2 MacBook Air I’m working on while I write this review. The M2 took around twice the time to finish the same test, at an average of 43 seconds across five runs.
What’s perhaps most impressive about the M5 MacBook Pro, though, is a more mundane consideration: battery life. Despite all its power, what I love most about this beefy laptop is the fact that it’s powerful and lasts an age away from the mains. In fact, it lasted a full 20hrs 22mins in our video rundown test.
That’s not much better than the M4 MacBook Pro, which registered 20hrs 13mins in the same benchmark, but it’s better in this regard than any Windows machine in a similar class. If you need a laptop for carrying out heavy-duty work on the move, this is the one to go for.
Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 2025) review: Verdict
That’s really my final verdict on the M5 MacBook Pro. It’s a brilliant workstation laptop if you need a lot of power and battery life, and the fact that it’s wrapped in a compact, robust package that’s really great to use is just a bonus. It’s not the outright most powerful laptop you can get for this sort of money or the best for gaming, nor is it the lightest or most compact for travel.
To be clear, you can buy better laptops that are better in each of those individual categories, and Windows laptops definitely offer better value for money if you need lots of storage and RAM.
However, if you need one laptop to do everything and don’t mind paying a premium for better specifications, then the M5 MacBook Pro is absolutely the best there is. It’s the finest all-the-talents laptop in the world.
