Review: MacBook Pro 16-inch (M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro is in its awkward era. It’s the fifth generation of this MacBook Pro, which initially launched to critical acclaim in 2021. The design has matured in certain ways, but it’s also stagnated, letting the competition get closer and closer to catching up.

If the reports end up being true, next year's MacBook Pros will be a more dramatic reinvention, sporting an assortment of new features including a touchscreen, a tandem OLED display, a thinner chassis, and who else knows what else. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to wait and see what's next. But I can also say with confidence that the M5 Max is ridiculously powerful, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro remains the most powerful, high-end laptop on the market.

There's still nothing else out there like it.

More of the Same

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I’m not going to spend too much time rehashing the basic features and design of this MacBook Pro. It’s looked more or less the same for almost five years. In particular, the M5 Max MacBook Pro has no discernible physical changes over the M4 Max, which introduced both the Space Black colorway and the optional nano-texture screen. Actually, I lied, there is one change. On American keyboards, Apple has changed the keycaps, removing words like Enter, Caps Lock, Tab, and Shift and replacing them with various arrows. This matches more closely to the model already sold in the UK. That's about it.

My test unit was provided by Apple for review. It was the 16-inch model with the M5 Max under the hood. As always, you’re able to get the M5 Max in the 14-inch size, and that’s where I prefer it. You need a 16-inch when you're in pro-level applications all day and don’t plan on using an external monitor, but 4.7 pounds is a lot to pack around, and it doesn’t exactly fit on a table at a coffee shop.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

There are no changes to the display, speakers, or webcam, but all remain top-of-class. That's especially true of the speakers. I've always said the six-speaker audio on the 16-inch MacBook Pro is good enough to throw a party with and is likely louder, bassier, and fuller-sounding than any Bluetooth speaker you own. The display still comes with the optional $150 upgrade for the nano-texture glass, which is totally worth the money. It's as clear as a glossy screen and deflects light and glare like a matte one.

Tandem OLED is reportedly coming. The color accuracy, clarity, and low input lag of OLED is unmatched, but beating the current Mini-LED MacBook Pro will be a tall order. It gets fantastic HDR performance, topping out at a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Games, videos, and movies look gorgeous.

Similarly, the claimed 24 hours of battery life also have changed from previous generations. And although it won't last that long in your daily workflow, it's in another league compared to alternative Windows laptops such as the Asus ProArt P16. Those laptops can compete on power, but not on battery life.

The ports also haven't changed in this model. However, Thunderbolt 5 debuted in the MacBook Pro in the previous generation, and it’s only become more useful over the past year as more accessory makers and docking stations become available that can take advantage of the higher bandwidth. I still wish there were some more Thunderbolt 5 external SSDs out there to put to use those higher bandwidth speeds.

This Is Outrageous

Let’s get to the only thing that really matters in this model: the performance of the M5 Max. Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max build upon the improvements already latent in the base M5 chip, such as the improved single-core performance and significant power-up for the GPU. The chips are stitched together using a new Fusion architecture found previously on the Ultra chips in the Mac Studio desktop. The M5 Max is two pieces of silicon, a significant change from Apple’s previous strategy of developing one singular, super-efficient chip. I don’t believe we’re really seeing the fruit of that change just yet, but it will likely be an important key to the direction the company’s chips will go in the future.

All that to say, the performance on the M5 Max MacBook Pro is stellar. And by stellar, I mean outrageous. And by outrageous, I mean it's so fast it's hard to know quite what to throw at it. It's record-setting in terms of the standard CPU benchmarks like Cinebench and Geekbench 6. And remember: You can get an extra 7 percent of multicore performance when you use the High Power mode, which cranks up the fans.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Here's something new: Integrated graphics that are as powerful as an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, like what you'd see on a proper gaming laptop. I threw on Cyberpunk 2077, raw-dogged without any MetalFX upscaling: 62 fps at Ultra setting with no help whatsoever. That goes to 88 fps in Medium and much higher if you use some upscaling.

I also checked some of the other more intensive Mac games such as Resident Evil Village, Lies of P, and the Apple Arcade title Oceanhorn 3. All of them are able to play at max settings while staying over 60 fps and not needing to rely on upscaling. In Lies of P, you can even bump up the resolution to 2560 x 1600. It feels fantastic, even if the fans get pretty loud. You can still get a Windows gaming laptop like the Lenovo LOQ 15 for thousands less, but if you want to game on a MacBook, we definitely have a new king. The only Mac more powerful remains the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. Compared to the M3 Max MacBook Pro I use, the M5 Max gets a 35 percent improved score in 3DMark Steel Nomad and a 43 percent better GPU score in Cinebench 2024.

Gaming is just the icing on the cake. In 2026, this laptop is for media creation and on-device AI. The GPU and insane multicore performance lets it rip through video edits and renders. Meanwhile, the option for up to 128 GB of unified memory, which has been around since the M3 Max, makes it a strong option for running on-device AI models. Just remember that you can upgrade to 128 GB only on the Max configurations (the Pro is stuck at 64 GB). In my briefing, Apple demonstrated some examples of running those models on-device, such as the new coding assistant built into Xcode and workflow involving AI-enhanced postproduction using DaVinci Resolve and ComfyUI. Increasingly, running those models (or other in-application AI features) in creative workflows is the primary use case for something as like the M5 Max, combining both the power of the GPU and the massive quantities of RAM.

I spun up LM Studio and saw how fast it handled the 70-billion parameter Llama-2 model. My prompt resulted in a 12.61 tokens per second response, which is not so bad for a model of that size. That puts this fairly large conversational model in conversational speed and gets closer to replicating the speed of the free version of ChatGPT. That's 31 percent faster than using the same prompt on my M3 Max MacBook Pro.

Each of these GPU cores also now has a neural accelerator, which also dramatically speeds up its AI powers. This was true in all the M5 chips, but when you have 40 cores at your disposal with the M5 Max, it stacks up. I tested the AI capabilities of the GPU using the Geekbench AI benchmark, which tests speed in a number of real-time, machine-learnings tasks such as object detection, facial recognition, and resolution upscaling. The M5 Max is 49 percent faster, despite having the same amount of GPU cores. Add in the Neural Engine that comes with all M5 chips, and you have one of the most powerful AI laptops on the market.

Apple is also touting storage speed as a feature. That's as a result of upgraded SSD controllers and faster bandwidth, thanks to using PCIe 5. But all that really matters is the result. While I never saw read speeds get up to the claimed 14.5 Gbps, I was seeing an average of double the read and write speed in the M5 Max over the M3 Max. That's huge, and it's something almost everyone will benefit from.

Buyers Beware

Photograph: Luke Larsen

You're going to pay handsomely if you want it. This has always been an expensive laptop, but there's another price increase this time. Apple has removed the 1-TB option from the configuration list on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, meaning it now starts with 2 TB for $3,899. In 2026, Apple increased both the starting storage capacity and price across the entire MacBook line, down to the 13-inch MacBook Air. This laptop is expensive for a typical MacBook buyer, but not expensive for this kind of laptop. One of the main Windows competitors, the Asus ProArt P16, sold for upwards of $4,500 when it was in stock.

Outside the 14-inch base M5 model, the modern MacBook Pro is actually designed (and priced) for people who use creative and AI applications all day for work, whether that's as a programmer, a game developer, video editor, or burgeoning AI entrepreneur. If you're a hobby programmer, the M5 models have way more performance than most people realize.

But should you buy an older aftermarket Max model? There are some reports saying that the M5 Max is too much power for the 96-watt charge on the 14-inch model to handle, dropping charge while plugged in during heavy loads. I can't verify that myself, but that's not a good sign and definitely not something I experienced on the 16-inch version (or any other MacBook I've tested). This 16-inch M5 Max model is still likely not worth it if you're coming from an M4 Max or M3 Max, but it will be a meaningful upgrade coming from the older M1 Max or M2 Max, especially if your day-to-day work depends on it.

The redesigned M6 MacBook Pro is coming later this year, but that doesn't mean we'll see the more powerful M6 Pro or M6 Max launch right out of the gate. If you need the performance that only the M5 Max can provide right now, this MacBook Pro is a great buy.