The M5 MacBook Pro is my top pick for power users and deep-pocketed shoppers who want a MacBook with the nicest, most future-proofed specs. It’s overkill for the average person, but it’s worth the splurge for artists, content creators, developers, AI enthusiasts, and other professionals with consistently demanding workloads. (It’s also the best MacBook for gaming, relatively speaking.) It’s available in one 14-inch size that makes it well-suited for on-the-go lifestyles.
The M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, making it the priciest pick on this guide. It maxes out with 32GB of RAM and 4TB of disk space, and there’s an optional nano-texture display upgrade that costs $150 extra.
Read Mashable’s full review of the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M5).
Some creative professionals will look at the M5 MacBook Air and find its specs a little lacking — more “adequate” than “amazing.” For you, there’s the M5 MacBook Pro.
To date, this guy has the best performance-to-battery-life ratio out of any MacBook we’ve tested. In demanding multi-core workloads, it’s faster than 90 percent of the laptops in our current testing database, including many newer Windows laptops that cost well over $2,000. It’s only nine percent faster than the M5 MacBook Air in such scenarios, but again, its fans make it better at handling them over a long period of time. Thermal throttling is more likely with an Air.
It’s worth mentioning that Mashable’s Timothy Beck Werth was able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on the M5 MacBook Pro. I wouldn’t buy it solely for this reason: Windows laptops are compatible with way more games than MacBooks, and PCs with discrete GPUs, especially, are much better-equipped to run graphically taxing titles. But just know that AAA gaming is possible here if you want to run the occasional mission after work.
The M5 MacBook Pro held out for 21 hours and 17 minutes in our battery life benchmark, lasting almost 30 percent longer than its M4 predecessor (an impressive gen-over-gen bump); it beats the M5 MacBook Air by well over three hours. It’s our battery life champ among MacBooks.
Design-wise, the M5 MacBook Pro is slightly less portable than the Air, but not by much. It’s less than 0.2 inches thicker than both sizes and 0.1 pounds heavier than the 15-inch model. This affords it enough room for extra fixings like an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, and a bonus Thunderbolt port, as well as an awesome hi-fi sound system with force-cancelling woofers. I’ve tested dozens of laptops over the course of my career, and none of them sound better than a MacBook Pro.
The M5 MacBook Pro looks as spectacular as it sounds, as per tradition. (Apple hasn’t made any drastic design changes to it since 2021.) Its mini-LED “Liquid Retina XDR” display offers a resolution of 3,024 x 1,964 pixels, a peak brightness of 1600 nits in HDR, and a 120Hz refresh rate. Compared to the M5 MacBook Air’s standard Liquid Retina screen, it’s crisper, brighter, and smoother when displaying visuals in motion — not necessary for all users, again, but very nice to have if you can swing the spend. Take your pick from two finishes: space black or silver. Be mindful that the former is a fingerprint magnet.
