MacBook Pro M5 and M5 Pro: Tested review

https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/reviews/macbook-pro-m5

Publish Date: 2026-03-27 03:00:00

The MacBook Pro M5 is finally the same amazing workhorse beast it ever was, delivering both a superior MacBook experience in its display and ports, with the option for a serious speed boost in the larger model. Yes, the perennial best laptop contender has been fully updated now that Apple’s rolled out a 16-inch model and its new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, offering both the larger screen size we love for multitasking and brawnier Apple Silicon chips you may or may not need. I’ve spent weeks testing both the 14- and 16-inch models and found there’s nothing they can’t do fantastically and speedily, whether I’m playing around with video editing and taking crystal-clear FaceTime calls or relaxing with some of the best movies of the decade.

So, while this laptop might not look a whole lot different from the MacBook Pro M4, it at least packs the speed upgrades you want if you’re shopping for a new MacBook Pro. Fortunately, I’ve been covering these things for more than a decade and am more than ready to explain what’s going on here — and whether these new MacBooks are for you.

Phenomenal battery life and a nice speed boost make the MacBook Pro M5 a great laptop for power users.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 felt phenomenally fast in my early testing, slicing through my suite of productivity apps such as Drafts, Todoist and the Brave web browser like a glowing lightsaber through butter. This is a MacBook Pro, though, so I don’t want to spend too much time praising it for handling basic software well. Instead, let’s look at how it performed on benchmarks and other testing. On the Geekbench 6 test, it posted the best single-core scores we’ve ever seen,…

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