Apple has been making the best laptops in the world for several years now, and the M5 MacBook Pro does nothing to interrupt that streak. After six weeks of daily use — writing, video editing, software development, and the kind of sustained heavy workloads that reveal a machine's true character — the M5 MacBook Pro is the best laptop I have ever used. It is also, depending on your needs, possibly not the laptop you should buy right now.

That caveat matters, and I will get to it. But first: the performance, the battery life, and the display that makes everything else look like a compromise.

The M5 Chip: What Apple Has Actually Achieved

The M5 chip is built on TSMC's second-generation 3nm process (N3E), the same node used for M4 but with significant architectural improvements. Apple has not published detailed specifications, but third-party analysis and benchmark results paint a clear picture.

In single-core CPU performance — the metric most relevant to everyday tasks — the M5 scores approximately 4,100 on Geekbench 6, a 15% improvement over M4. Multi-core performance is up 18%, reaching approximately 24,500 on the same benchmark. These are the highest scores ever recorded for a laptop processor.

GPU performance is where the improvement is most dramatic. The M5 Pro's 20-core GPU scores approximately 98,000 on the Metal benchmark — a 28% improvement over M4 Pro. For video editors, 3D artists, and machine learning practitioners, this is a meaningful real-world difference. In my testing, a 4K ProRes RAW export that took 8 minutes 42 seconds on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro completed in 6 minutes 31 seconds on the M5 Pro — a 25% improvement that compounds significantly over a working day.

The Neural Engine has been upgraded to 38 cores (from 32 in M4) and Apple claims a 40% improvement in machine learning performance. This matters increasingly as Apple Intelligence features — on-device AI processing for writing assistance, image generation, and Siri improvements — become more central to the macOS experience.

Battery Life: The Number That Sounds Impossible Until You Test It

Apple rates the M5 MacBook Pro 14-inch at 24 hours of battery life. This number sounds like marketing fiction. After six weeks of testing, I can confirm it is not.

In my standard working day — a mix of writing in Markdown, web browsing with 15–20 tabs open, video calls, and light photo editing — the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro consistently lasted 22–24 hours between charges. I stopped carrying a charger to the office after the first week. This is not a minor convenience improvement; it is a fundamental change in how you relate to a laptop.

Under sustained heavy load — continuous video export, machine learning training, or running multiple virtual machines — battery life drops to approximately 8–10 hours, which is still competitive with the best Windows laptops. The M5's efficiency advantage is most pronounced in the mixed workloads that characterise real working days, where the chip's ability to park idle cores and scale power consumption dynamically produces battery life that no x86 laptop can approach.

The 16-inch model, with its larger battery, achieves approximately 26–28 hours in the same mixed workload testing — genuinely remarkable for a machine with this level of performance.

The Display: Liquid Retina XDR at Its Best

The M5 MacBook Pro uses the same Liquid Retina XDR display as its predecessors, and it remains the best laptop display available. The 14-inch panel offers 3024 x 1964 resolution at 254 PPI, 1000 nits sustained brightness (1600 nits peak for HDR content), and ProMotion adaptive refresh rate from 24Hz to 120Hz.

What makes this display exceptional is not any single specification but the combination of them. The contrast ratio — enabled by mini-LED backlighting with 2596 local dimming zones — produces blacks that are genuinely black rather than the dark grey of most LCD panels. The colour accuracy is exceptional out of the box, with Delta E values below 1 across the P3 wide colour gamut. And the ProMotion refresh rate makes scrolling and cursor movement feel fluid in a way that 60Hz displays cannot match.

After six weeks on the M5 MacBook Pro display, returning to any other laptop screen — including the excellent displays on the Dell XPS 16 and LG Gram Pro — feels like a downgrade. This is the display that professional photographers, video editors, and designers have been asking for in a portable form factor.

Design and Build Quality: Unchanged and Still Excellent

Apple has not changed the MacBook Pro's design since the 2021 redesign that introduced the notch, MagSafe, and the expanded port selection. The chassis is the same Space Black, Silver, or Space Grey aluminium unibody, the keyboard is the same excellent scissor-switch mechanism, and the trackpad is the same oversized Force Touch glass surface that remains the best laptop trackpad in the industry.

The port selection — three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, SD card reader, headphone jack, and MagSafe — is generous by laptop standards and covers the needs of most professional users without requiring dongles. The HDMI port supports 8K output at 60Hz, which is relevant for the growing number of users with 8K monitors or projectors.

At 1.55kg for the 14-inch and 2.14kg for the 16-inch, the MacBook Pro is not the lightest laptop in its class — the LG Gram Pro 16 weighs 1.19kg — but the weight is well-distributed and the machine feels solid rather than heavy. The build quality is exceptional: no flex in the chassis, no creaking, no sharp edges. This is a laptop that feels like it will last a decade.

macOS Sequoia and Apple Intelligence

The M5 MacBook Pro ships with macOS Sequoia and the latest version of Apple Intelligence — Apple's suite of on-device AI features. The M5's improved Neural Engine makes a noticeable difference to Apple Intelligence performance: Writing Tools (which can rewrite, summarise, and improve text across any app) respond faster, image generation in Image Playground is quicker, and the expanded Siri capabilities feel more responsive.

Apple Intelligence's on-device processing model — where AI tasks are handled locally rather than sent to a cloud server — has significant privacy advantages and means that AI features work without an internet connection. The trade-off is that on-device models are less capable than the largest cloud-based models. Apple's approach is to use on-device processing for tasks where it is sufficient and route more complex requests to Private Cloud Compute — Apple's privacy-preserving cloud AI infrastructure — when needed.

In practice, Apple Intelligence is genuinely useful for writing assistance, summarisation, and basic image generation, but it does not match the capability of ChatGPT or Claude for complex reasoning tasks. For users who want the best AI assistant capability, the MacBook Pro's integration with third-party AI tools via the API is more relevant than Apple Intelligence itself.

The Caveat: Should You Wait for M5 Max?

The significant caveat I mentioned at the outset: the M5 MacBook Pro currently ships with M5 and M5 Pro configurations. The M5 Max — Apple's highest-performance chip variant, with up to 40 GPU cores and 128GB of unified memory — has not yet been released. Based on Apple's historical release cadence, M5 Max configurations are expected in late 2026 or early 2027.

For most users — writers, developers, photographers, video editors working with footage up to 8K — the M5 Pro is more than sufficient. But for users who need maximum GPU performance for 3D rendering, machine learning, or high-resolution video work, waiting for M5 Max may be worthwhile. The M5 Max's GPU performance improvement over M5 Pro is typically 40–50% based on the M4 generation's differential, which is significant for GPU-bound workloads.

If you need a laptop now and your workloads are not GPU-bound, buy the M5 Pro MacBook Pro without hesitation. If you can wait three to six months and your work is GPU-intensive, the M5 Max will be worth the wait.

Verdict: The Best Laptop Available, Full Stop

The M5 MacBook Pro is the best laptop available in 2026. The combination of benchmark-leading performance, 24-hour real-world battery life, the best laptop display in the industry, and macOS's software quality creates a package that no Windows laptop can currently match across all dimensions simultaneously.

The price — starting at $1,999 USD / $2,999 AUD for the 14-inch M5 model — is significant but justified by the performance and longevity. A MacBook Pro purchased today will be a capable, fast machine in five years; the same cannot be said for most Windows laptops at any price point.

If you are a professional who depends on your laptop and you are not constrained by Windows-specific software requirements, the M5 MacBook Pro is the correct choice. It is not a close call.

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