MacBook Pro M5 Pro, M5 Max Review (2026): Peak Creative Power

The past few generations of MacBook Pro have been physically identical, regardless of configuration. The new 16-inch line for 2026 has the same design, so looks won’t be a factor when you’re deciding between the M5 Max, M5 Pro or even an older model. It’ll all come down to your performance needs. Yes, like most laptops, they get faster every year, but the big jump in GPU performance is what’s made the M5 line stand out, as we first saw with the 2025 14-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the M5. 

The MacBook Pro’s display remains excellent, and I really do still think the nano-texture coating is worth the money if you work in bright or glareful conditions. I don’t love that you can’t set the display refresh rate to 120Hz. The only way to get there is automatically in ProMotion mode — Apple’s adaptive refresh rate technology — but I like to use a higher-than-60Hz refresh rate all the time. The laptops don’t yet have panels with the Adobe RGB expanded gamut support found in the Studio Display XDR, and it’s not clear if they ever will. But they’re built like tanks and have the weight to prove it, and for professional creative work, they really are hard to beat. 

I’ve only had a few days to test the two models, so I’ll be back with battery testing — they’re rated at up to 24 hours, a couple hours longer than the last generation of 16-inch models, which makes it pretty time consuming. I’ll also conduct more application-based testing and some stress testing, but given how little has changed otherwise, I’m confident enough to state that these are still some of the best laptops around. Apple’s battery ratings are generally spot on for the type of testing, in our case, continuously streaming video.

The upgrade across the M5 generation to the N1 networking chip also helps. Wi-Fi 7 increases stability when connecting to the 6GHz channel, and all the M5 MacBook Pros have been faster to connect and better at sustaining it with my Wi-Fi 6E router.

The MacBook Pro’s prices have increased over previous years, which reflects the current spike in component prices. Since you can’t increase the amount of memory post-purchase, you may either have to pay a lot now (the bump from 64GB to 128GB is $800, for example) or resign yourself to perhaps cutting back. You can get excellent performance with even the 48GB I had in the M5 Pro model, and I do recommend my M5 Pro test configuration over the maxed-out M5 Max unless you have more extreme performance needs. The base $2,699 M5 Pro configuration with 1TB storage and 24GB RAM is probably solid, though.

Peak creative power

Thanks to Apple’s updated chip design, which allows it to more easily increase the number of graphics cores, your choice between the two processors comes down to only how powerful a GPU you need: The GPU now (as of the M5) handles not just graphics processing but complex generative AI calculations. Your choices are 20, 32 or 40 GPU cores, and doubling the cores (from 20 to 40) yields roughly up to 1.7x a performance boost. I found that a 1.2x to 1.8x improvement was more typical in my testing, with 1.5x to 1.8x improvement on generative imaging, gaming and 3D rendering.

Apple’s chip performance has always been remarkably consistent, and with the M5 Pro and M5 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro it becomes a little more predictable. All the M5-line chips have the same 16-core Neural Engine. This means the entire MacBook Pro line, including the M5 MacBook Pro 14 and probably the M5 MacBook Air as well, seem to perform nearly identically, regardless of the amount of memory. For general computing, including the types of AI used for everyday work or school — writing support, basic image editing, videoconferencing processing — it doesn’t matter which M5 model you get.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max processors for the 16-inch both have 18 CPU cores, with the same balance of “super” (formerly “performance” cores) as the new performance cores — only the 14-inch can be configured with the 15-core M5 Pro. You can expect the same processing performance from both chips, unless whatever you’re doing is memory bound. 

In other words, unless you’re running something graphics intensive, you’ll probably get the same performance for a lot of everyday tasks. Since the memory is shared between CPU and GPU, if you’re not loading high-resolution video, photo or game textures, or using AI to generate complex imagery, video or code, the Pro vs. Max doesn’t matter much either. You’ll need more memory if you run a lot of anything: Even Google apps can bog you down if you have a lot of Chrome tabs and big workbooks.

Both do show a big drop in performance in low-power mode. But as long as you don’t need to use them maxed out for a long period of time on your lap, since they can get pretty hot, and don’t mind the heavy fan use under the same conditions, you really shouldn’t need to drop into that mode. 

All told, this year’s MacBook Pro 16s provide a great upgrade from almost any generation, but this may also be the last generation before the rumored update to OLED or touchscreen displays. I think the current screens have many of the benefits of OLED already — primarily P3 gamut and sufficiently pure blacks — along with likely even better brightness, but OLED would probably lighten the load. This screen still ranks at the top of the class, though, so it’s up to you and your needs whether you want to wait.

M5 MacBook Pro vs. M4 vs. M3: Benchmark test results