M5 vs. M4 vs. M4 Pro vs. M4 Max: Which Apple Chip Do You Need?

It’s typically simple to choose a general system model to buy from Apple — you probably know whether you want a 14- or 16-inch MacBook or a minimal desktop like the Mac Mini, for example. But within each line or when looking at older models on sale, the choice can come down to which processor configuration it has. And that may be complicated when comparing last-generation chips to current versions. Another consideration are constraints imposed by the SoC design, notably with respect to memory. 

So when configuring an Apple system, if you have any needs beyond the basics — typical email, web surfing, watching video, online gaming, videoconferencing and basic productivity — be prepared to figure out your needs for processing and graphics processing to make sure your choice won’t limit you. And you’ll have to pay for it now because you can’t upgrade later.

Apple’s current lineup of products — MacBooks, iMac, iPads and the Vision Pro headset —  use the older M4, M4 Pro, M4 Max, as well as the M5. The company also continues to use the M3 Ultra in its high-end Mac Studio and the two-generations-back M2 Ultra in Mac Pro systems. (The Mac Pro isn’t a good option for a lot of reasons, and rumors indicate the two-plus-year-old system won’t be updated anytime soon.)

In short, our recommendation for choosing a chip:

• Either the M4 or M5 chip is fine for most users with general computing needs, travelers and remote workers, as well as some light pro tasks, like basic photo and video editing. 
• If you need to perform AI-based image generation or want to game, the M5 is a better bet than the M4.
• The M4 Pro is a good choice for users who need the performance for processing-intensive tasks like heavy video editing, as well as power users and those who want to future-proof their machines.
• Because of its highest GPU core count, more ProRes accelerators and Thunderbolt 5 support, the M4 Max is a better choice for workflows that are GPU-intensive, such as 3D rendering, CAD, 8K video editing, animation, and AI and machine-learning applications. 
• The doubled NPU plus maximum GPU core counts and the most ProRes accelerators make the M3 Ultra the right pick for scientific analysis, architectural rendering, heavy video editing and processing, AI modeling, and other large-scale professional projects.

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Matching needs to specs can be really hard not just because it requires knowing how applications use the various components (and guessing what applications you’ll be using three years from now), but because performance is all about balance. For example, when we refer to an application or task as “GPU-intensive,” we mean that most of the work is performed by the GPU — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the GPU is (or should be) your primary concern. 

Watch this: M4 MacBook Air Review: Still Fantastic Even if Not Much Has Changed

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It could be the case that 90% of what the GPU does is render elements to the screen in your 3D design application and that the final high-quality render is performed by the CPU. A fast GPU but slow CPU might make your designing and previewing experience fluid but make you wait irritatingly long for the final render — especially if you have to iterate through variations of the latter.

M4 vs. M5

Both base M chips offer plenty of oompf for most uses, and the CPUs and Neural Engines of the two generations are pretty much the same — the M5 is tweaked for faster clock speeds. That gives the M5 a typical year-over-year increase on single-core and multicore processor performance over the M4 of somewhere between 10% and 20%, which you might or might not notice depending upon your software. 

The biggest change lies in the GPU. Apple introduced Neural Accelerators into the GPU cores, which help to speed up AI-related tasks, like image generation and game upscaling. For instance, on Procyon’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 image-generation test, we found the M5 was almost twice as fast as the M4. Apple also updated to a third-generation ray tracing engine and updated shader cores, both optimized to make graphics performance faster and smoother, whether for gaming or rendering 3D images. Frame rates with ray tracing improved by almost 50% (3DMark Solar Bay and Solar Bay Extreme), and the standard shaders yielded an almost 30% increase (3DMark Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Lite).

The M5’s improvements might be noticeable to users who run applications that rely heavily on the GPU, but most users won’t see a difference for everyday computing; on our MacBook Pro 14 M5, even the gaming improvements didn’t make games with borderline performance more playable without quality compromises. The M4 is still one of the best chips you can buy in terms of performance and efficiency, and you’d still be well-served by an M4 machine, especially if you can get it on sale. The M5 would be worth upgrading to from earlier M-series Macs, particularly the M1 or M2.

Go Pro (or Max or Ultra)?

The M5 still trails behind the rest of the line according to our testing, predominantly because CPU and GPU performance is all about multipliers: The individual cores in the M5 may be notably faster, but there are still a lot more of them in the higher-end chips.

If Apple ships Pro and Max versions of the M5, that will likely change, but for now the only options are the M4 generation. Frankly, if you perform a lot of image or video generation, model training and so on, you may want to hold off buying for a while because those GPU neural accelerators are worth it. Hopefully, the higher-end processors will arrive in the spring in updated MacBook Pros or Mac Studio. (Rumors put a Mac Pro upgrade as unlikely any time in the near future, but that’s another story.)

The M4 Pro offers a significant processor performance bump over the M5 — it delivered about 36% faster performance on Cinebench 2024 multicore and almost 30% on Geekbench 6 multicore in our testing. If you want to play games with moderately heavy 3D rendering, you definitely need more GPU cores than the base chips have.

Still, the M4 Pro is essentially just the M4 chip with higher core counts and support for a little more memory. To get substantially better performance, you probably want to go with the M4 Max, which is especially true if you edit high-resolution video and do other tasks that require heavy lifting by the GPU and use a lot of memory, need to render highly detailed final 3D CAD models in a reasonable amount of time (frequently CPU intensive, depending upon the software) and the like.

In addition to having a lot more cores in both the CPU and GPU and support for up to 128GB RAM, the Max has two ProRes accelerators (versus one in the lower-end chips), which can speed up video transcoding, exporting, editing and more. The Max also supports an additional display and HDMI at 4K/240Hz, compared to 144Hz with the M4, M5 and M4 Pro. And the chip incorporates higher-bandwidth Thunderbolt 5 (versus 4), which allows for faster handing of large files on external drives and higher wattage power delivery, among other things.

The Ultra variant is Apple’s highest-performance chip if you need a professional workstation for scientific computing, 3D simulation, film production and more. It has the highest core counts all around, supports up to 512GB memory, more displays and four ProRes accelerators. The current top-of-the-line chip is the M3 Ultra, available only in the Mac Studio.