The M5 MacBook Pro Isn’t the Apple Upgrade You’ve Been Waiting For

On the multi-core front, you’re still getting a 10-core CPU, which matches the configuration of the M4 on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. So, if you want more multi-core performance, you’ll need to wait for the M5 Pro or M5 Max. But for now, the M5 is seeing around a 17 percent improvement in multi-core performance too—and again, that’s without increasing the core count. This is all good stuff, but I’m not sure that the average person will really notice the benefit in day-to-day performance.

You may notice the increase in fan noise though, which is one of the main differences between the M4 and the M4 Pro/Max, which use two fans instead of one. The M5 MacBook Pro remains great at not using the fan unless totally necessary, but when it does kick on, it’s quite loud. I’m assuming it’s around the same as the M4 MacBook Pro, but I didn’t have it side by side to compare. The positive of that is the internal temperatures. I’ve seen CPU temperatures in MacBooks happily peak at 105 degrees Celsius when under full load. But I never measured anything over 89 degrees Celsius on this laptop, which is a great sign.

Storage performance is also an area of improvement Apple has highlighted, now using the latest PCIe Gen 5 standard to result in twice the SSD read and write speeds. Again, you have to compare apples to apples here, because the M4 Pro and Max models already had faster read/write speeds over the base M4. With average read speeds of around 6,500 MB/s and write speeds of 6,728 MB/s, the storage performance on the M5 is now actually slightly faster than the M4 Pro. You can now configure this to 4 terabytes, up from 2 terabytes on the previous M4 and M4 Pro models.

Pushing AI Forward

While the M5 happily keeps the CPU performance gains humming along, its larger strides are in graphics and AI. Regardless of what you think about the implementation of Apple Intelligence, there plenty of other things you can do with local AI processing, whether that’s run on-device LLMs through apps like Draw Things or Misty Studio, both of which can leverage the AI hardware inside the M5 MacBook Pro. There are two primary changes to the M5 in terms of AI performance. One is the faster Neural Engine, which handles AI tasks that require speed or that run in the background, such as Apple Intelligence. According to my runs of Geekbench AI, the Neural Engine in the M5 is an average of 29 percent faster than the M4, and 40 percent faster than the M3.

The GPU cores also now include Neural Accelerators, a feature first seen in the A19 chip in the iPhone 17 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). The idea here is to speed up heavier, one-time AI workloads, especially in apps that already rely heavily on GPU performance, such as in video editing software. This is not unlike the Tensor Cores you find in Nvidia graphics cores. The effect this has on speeding up workloads is tricky to quantify and make definitive claims around, but I did notice that the M5 outperforms the MacBook Pro M3 by 5 percent when I ran Geekbench AI on the GPU, despite the fact that the M3 Max is a more powerful GPU overall.