Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-Inch) Review: More of the Same

On the multi-core front, you still get a 10-core processor, which matches the M4 configuration on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. So if you want more multi-core performance, you’ll have to wait for the M5 Pro or M5 Max. But for now, the M5 also sees about a 17% improvement in multi-core performance, and again, that’s without increasing the core count. This is all a good thing, but I’m not sure the average person will really notice the benefits in their daily performance.

You may notice increased fan noise, which is one of the main differences between the M4 and the M4 Pro/Max, which use two fans instead of one. The MacBook Pro M5 remains excellent at not using the fan unless absolutely necessary, but when it does start up, it’s quite loud. I guess it’s about the same as the MacBook Pro M4, but I didn’t have it side by side to compare. The positive point is the internal temperatures. I’ve seen CPU temperatures on MacBooks peak at 105 degrees Celsius when under full load. But I never measured anything above 89 degrees Celsius on this laptop, which is a good sign.

Storage performance is also an area of ​​improvement highlighted by Apple, now using the latest PCIe Gen 5 standard to achieve twice the SSD read and write speeds. Again, you have to compare apples to apples here, as the M4 Pro and Max models already had faster read/write speeds than the base M4. With average read speeds of around 6,500MB/s and write speeds of 6,728MB/s, the M5’s storage performance is now slightly faster than the M4 Pro. You can now configure it to 4 terabytes, compared to 2 terabytes on the previous M4 and M4 Pro models.

Advancing AI

While the M5 happily maintains CPU performance gains, its biggest advancements are in graphics and AI. Regardless of how you feel about the Apple Intelligence implementation, there are plenty of other things you can do with local AI processing, whether it’s running LLMs on-device through apps like Draw Things or Misty Studio, both of which can leverage the M5 MacBook Pro’s AI hardware. The M5 features two main changes in terms of AI performance. One is the faster Neural Engine, which handles AI tasks that require speed or run in the background, like Apple Intelligence. Based on my Geekbench AI runs, the M5’s neural engine is on average 29% faster than the M4 and 40% faster than the M3.

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 accelerate one-off, heavier AI workloads, especially in applications that already rely heavily on GPU performance, such as in video editing software. This is reminiscent of the Tensor cores you find in Nvidia graphics cores. The effect this has on accelerating workloads is difficult to quantify and make definitive claims, but I noticed that the M5 outperformed the M3 MacBook Pro by 5% when I ran Geekbench AI on the GPU, despite the fact that the M3 Max is a more powerful GPU overall.