14-Inch MacBook Pro (M5) Review: New Soul in an Old Body

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip is Apple’s entrenched, well-worn, and still elegant stepping stone into 2026. In a year’s time, we’ll hopefully see whole new varieties of MacBooks hit the scene. But I don’t much enjoy pretending to exist in some vague future—not when we don’t know how our current economic reality will shape tomorrow’s gadget economy. Existing in the now, with the singular new MacBook Pro in tow sporting Apple’s latest silicon, you can feel safe knowing it’s still a great laptop. But if you were hoping for something—anything—truly novel, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5’s best, new qualities are subtle, almost to the point they disappear into the background.

Apple’s smaller, entry-level MacBook Pro remains a beast for how portable it is. It’s so standardized I can slip it into my daily routine as easily as changing a pair of pants. Despite the ongoing proliferation of Trump’s international tariff scheme, the MacBook Pro doesn’t cost any more than the $1,600 starting price of last year’s M4 model.

At that price, it comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. That may be enough for some Mac users, though going up a step to 24GB of RAM or 1TB of storage will demand $200 for each bump up. If you need a MacBook Pro for photo editing and daily writing tasks (or maybe even some light gaming), the base model would fill your needs perfectly. Plus, macOS 26 and the Liquid Glass redesign look better and cleaner than they do on iPhones.

But what if you want more? Currently, the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips round out Apple’s laptop slate. There’s also a Mac mini with M4 Pro chip, which is especially good for desktop users, and it’s the cheapest way to get access to Apple’s more powerful chip. So anybody who’s planning to get a brand new Mac for more intensive tasks, like video editing, 3D modeling, or—yes—some gaming, you may be incentivized to peer into your crystal ball. Then, the question becomes how long you’ll need to wait, or how long you should wait. There have been strong hints Apple has a total redesign just around the corner with OLED displays. And those MacBook Pros may be even more powerful and likely even more expensive.

For the things that matter, the MacBook Pro with M5 chip is an incredible machine, though it’s stretching the limits of what Apple’s years-old design can handle.

So we’re still using Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6E?

Apple’s latest 14-inch laptop looks like the MacBook Pro with M4 chip, which looked like the MacBook Pro with M3 chip, which looked like the MacBook Pro with M2 chip, which looked like the MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/M1 Max chip. Inside, the MacBook Pro with M5 may look a little different. It may even be a little more repairable, according to the repair gurus at iFixit. For longtime Mac users, it’s the same laptop you’re all too intimate with. Like all long-term relationships, you’ll immediately recognize what you love and what ticks you off.

Apple made a big deal about the new Mac’s enhanced SSD allowing for faster read and write speeds. Yes, that will matter for specific use cases. In Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test, the MacBook Pro with M5 held its own with over 6,500MB/s write speeds and around 6,150MB/s read speeds. That’s more than twice as fast as the same MacBook with M4, and it easily puts this laptop into the pro-level category compared to many other SSDs you’ll find on comparable PCs. It’s a better showing than years ago when Apple stuck a slower SSD on its 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 chip.

All this means for most users is the MacBook Pro with M5 can import RAW files from your external storage such as SSD and memory cards faster than previous models. It’s a good thing that the MacBook Pro with M5 still has a fair number of ports to its name, including HDMI, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, and the MagSafe 3 port (which supports up to 140W, though the USB-C ports can also hook up to 96W bricks for fast charging). What’s odd is how the MacBoook Pro with M5 is still sticking with Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports when Thunderbolt 5 has been around for several years at this point. In the same vein, Apple stuck with Wi-Fi 6E rather than moving on to Wi-Fi 7. Yes, I know few people have even moved up to Wi-Fi 6. For those folks who want the fastest data transfer speeds, this laptop won’t offer the peak of what’s possible.

And if you weren’t already enamored—or at least used to—Apple’s Magic Keyboard and trackpad, nothing here will change your mind. Not to mention, there’s still a notch cupping the MacBook Pro’s 14-inch, mini LED (which Apple calls its Liquid Retina XDR) display. With macOS 26 and the transparent menu bar at the top of the screen, the notch surrounding the 12-megapixel “Center Stage†webcam is more glaring than ever. As much as the
“shortcomings†are as glaring as ever, its best characteristics are still as comfortable as ever. The MacBook Pro with M5’s six-speaker system still offers fine audio for watching movies with a partner in bed. They also support spatial audio with Dolby Atmos.

The MacBook Pro screen has long been of fine quality, though it won’t beat the tandem OLED on Apple’s own iPad Pros with M4 and M5 chips. My version of the MacBook Pro with M5 also came with a nano-texture display. Apple claims this coating reduces glare and reflections, and I can confirm it will make your screen legible even in direct light. It comes at the cost of some display fidelity and a minor loss of overt brightness. Visuals may not look as crisp and clean as they would without the $150 extra screen coating. Most people can go without, unless you plan to be working outdoors or next to floor-to-ceiling windows 24/7.

Let’s be real, you don’t care about a Mac’s AI performance

Just a single MacBook generation ago, Apple’s marketing focused on grabbing all those wayward Intel Mac users and bringing them into the M-series fold. Now, five years since Apple first released the M1 chip, it’s pushing all those M1 user to finally make an upgrade. And why not? This MacBook is indeed more powerful than what you were using half a decade ago. But is it the MacBook you want, or simply the MacBook you can afford?

The M5 is a better chip than the M4; that much is clear based on our tests. What isn’t is just how much performance we may be missing out on, since tests show the clock speeds on the M5 are being limited by thermal throttling. More power means more heat, and the new MacBook Pro simply can’t handle all of what the M5’s generating. In Geekbench 6 tests, the MacBook Pro with M5 chip recorded 400 points more than the MacBook Pro with M4 chip in single-core settings and around 2,000 in multi-core tests. It was a similar story in Cinebench 2024, where the M5 chip finally cracked 200 points in single-core tests—the first chip I’ve tested to accomplish that feat. But it was not nearly as significant a jump in multi-core tests, which leads to the suspicion that thermal throttling is limiting just how well the laptop can perform when pushed to its limits.

The big upgrades Apple pushed with the new M5 chip are mostly in the graphics department. That includes new neural engines within each of the GPUs, or the graphics processors. Apple claimed this should multiply the ability for the laptop to process AI tasks. Then again, Apple still doesn’t have any hint of its upgraded Siri or any of the Apple Intelligence capabilities. Any ability to talk to your Mac and have it work on your behalf as an “agent†has been indefinitely delayed. Instead, Apple pointed to apps like DaVinci Resolve, which has some on-device AI capabilities, or Draw Things to make inane AI-generated images without needing the cloud. Trying to build an image in that app will still take you more than a minute to generate and then even longer to sample, depending on the size of your chosen AI model.

The GPU in the MacBook Pro with M5 will perform twice as well with AI tasks compared to the previous MacBook Pro with M4, according to Geekbench AI benchmarks, but I have yet to see an app that can show me what that looks like other than generating awful AI cat photos in half the time.

Should I start gaming on my Mac?

At least, the new M5 chip’s graphics capabilities are worthy of mention. In 3DMark, the M5 was pushing the M4 around across the board. It beat the M4 in the Steel Nomad Light tests by nearly 1,100 points, managing around 39 average frames per second compared to 31 fps. The most impressive feat is with ray tracing benchmarks. The M5 chip sports a new ray tracing engine to allow for more realistic lighting effects in games (ray tracing is also really intensive on the GPU, hence why it normally hinders performance on even the beefiest systems). In the 3DMark Solar Bay tests, the M5 chip outperformed the MacBook Pro with M4 by nearly twice as much.

Let’s just ignore synthetic benchmarks for now, and let’s focus on how this shakes out in real-world examples. The best way to test out these ray tracing capabilities is with Cyberpunk 2077. The 5-year-old game still has some of the most impressive ray-traced lighting in any modern game, but that doesn’t mean the M5 chip suddenly allows you to push all those drool-worthy realistic lighting settings. Apple tries to enforce a “For this Mac†setting in graphics settings, which dulls down the resolution and enforces a 30 fps target. However, if you opt for a 1,800 x 1,125 resolution and slide the settings to the “Ray Tracing Low†preset, you can get around 37 fps in benchmarks using Apple’s MetalFX upscaling. MetalFX is taking the game running at 1,200 x 750 resolution and using AI to make the game appear as if it’s at the higher resolution. That performance is far better than the sub-30 fps you would get on the MacBook Pro with M4 chip with the same settings.

Still, you’ll struggle with frame rates at higher settings. I don’t know about you, but I detest the idea of limiting my resolution for the sake of playable performance in my PC games. If I try to push the resolution to the max 3,024 x 1,890, the MacBook Pro with M5 chugs along at below playable framerates, even with upscaling. You may be able to push the ray tracing effects and still get 30 fps, but forever with caveats.

And that’s if you find more games with ray tracing available on Mac. Apple is promising to release Control (another 6-year-old title) on Mac, iPad, and Vision Pro with M5 next year. That game does have some ray tracing effects. Luckily, the GPU performance has improved performance in other titles as well. I could max out resolution and settings on Resident Evil 4 and achieve between 45 and 55 fps during gameplay, whereas the M4 chip would sit closer to around 40 fps. In a game like Sniper Elite 4, I can easily get above 60 fps on the highest settings. Apple is adding more games to the Mac, though progress is very, very slow. But, hell, maybe you’ll find that one game you still haven’t tried, and maybe your MacBook Pro will have the juice to play it without too many compromises.

In our Blender test, where we get the Mac to render a scene of a BMW, it took the M5 chip 2 minutes and 22 seconds running on the CPU and around 14 seconds on the GPU. A MacBook Pro with M4 chip running on the same macOS 26 update will do it in 22 seconds on the GPU. The M5 chip will be much faster if a scene is using ray-traced lighting. Depending on what you need, the M5 chip could be a big breakthrough at a reasonable price. It also makes me wonder what a M5 Pro and M5 Pro Max chip could have in store.

I also found the MacBook Pro with M5’s lone fan would start to kick in hard during my tests. MacBook Pro models with an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip house two fans instead of one, meaning they’re better designed to handle more powerful processors, though normally at the cost of some battery life.

It’s has an ‘all-day battery,’ for the most part

The phrase “all-day battery life†used to be mere puffery, but more and more it’s becoming a reality. That’s more true for MacBooks than many other PCs you can buy today, though the new MacBook Pro with M5 chip isn’t suddenly doing better than the MacBook Pro with M4 chip. The older laptop promised a 24-hour battery life (based on video streaming tests). In real life, the MacBook Pro could make it a full 7 or 8 hours before it was begging for the nearest outlet. That remains true with the MacBook Pro with M5, though perhaps not as well when under load.

When simply using it as a daily driver, doing basic browsing tasks, and running multiple Chrome windows plus Slack, I could easily make it through an entire workday and still have enough battery left over for watching some YouTube videos at home. It’s when pushing the MacBook Pro with M5’s GPU in my AI tests where I saw it truly start to drain by close to 20% in under 15 minutes. It won’t even deplete as fast when running Cyberpunk 2077. I have heard the fans on this chassis kick in more than I did after months and months of using the MacBook Pro with M4. The blades weren’t spinning at the jet engine level you find on many large gaming laptops. Still, it was loud enough to generate an odd look from at least one deskmate who is used to my loud laptops, which sound like a helicopter about to take off.

Which is why I can’t help but see that the current MacBook Pro design is starting to overstay its welcome. The new MacBook with M5 is still one of the best you can buy, especially at the base price. I’m wondering if a MacBook Air with M5 will be able to match its capabilities at a $1,000 starting price. However, that thermal throttling problem may grow even worse with a fanless chassis. If you need a laptop with all these accoutrements—like the mini LED display and SD card port—I can’t think of many other laptops I can recommend more. But I should also mention that anybody looking for the next big thing can still wait a year and see what the future holds.