M5 MacBook Pro First Impressions

[karranz]

My 2017 MBP died last week, so I had to get this one. Can’t believe in almost 2026 I’m staring at legacy ports again — an SD card slot like it’s 2012, an HDMI port nobody needs when USB-C does it all (power + display), and that ridiculous proprietary MagSafe comeback nobody asked for. Feels like progress… backwards.

 

[bluecoast]

I’m happy this laptop exists even though most consumers probably shouldn’t get it.

 

[RPhoto]

My 2017 MBP died last week, so I had to get this one. Can’t believe in almost 2026 I’m staring at legacy ports again — an SD card slot like it’s 2012, an HDMI port nobody needs when USB-C does it all (power + display), and that ridiculous proprietary MagSafe comeback nobody asked for. Feels like progress… backwards.

Paying devils advocate on this…

I do presentations to clients, connecting to their projector/screen, they only ever have hdmi to offer me. When I had the touch bar Pro, it drove me crazy needing a dongle for HDMI.

SD port. 100% agree, every camera I have owned and used going back forever has been CF, XQD and now CFExpress. However… many of my clients use cameras that offer SD slots and they get a lot of use from the built in readers.

That said, these days you can just connect the camera direct and use it as a card reader itself. But this type of functionality still doesn’t seem to have fully sunk in yet.

So I can see the pros and cons to both sides of this.

 

[jonnysods]

Apple really needs to rethink their naming scheme and make it more consistent throughout all products. A Pro device should always have a Pro chip, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I get that “Pro” is mostly marketing by Apple, but seriously, at least stick to it. They’re doing the same thing with the iPad Air. “Air” used to mean the thinnest and lightest model, yet they released the M4 iPad Pro, which is actually thinner than the Air.

Completely agree - M5 should be for the MBA, iMac etc, and there should only be two processor options for the MBP, Pro and Max. It's so whacky, how can the Mac Pro still be on M2. I think given the stagnation of the product offerings, monkeying around with processor releases and types is the only way to encourage upgrading or fill people with the sense they are missing out on the best performance.

One thing that massively irks me is the intentional lmitation of external displays. I could get 3 displays runing on a 2018 Intel i5 MBA, but on the MacBook Pro M5 you can't? But we get told how much faster the GPU is, still can't run 3 external monitors.

 

[Corefile]

Spec bump to the neglected member of the Mac family. Apple Marketing trying to force early adopters to buy one of these when they really want Airs (Macbook, not iPhone Air - nobody wants an iPhone Air).

 

[tpannier]

Same thing. Just incremented number.

Comments as these really discredit the engineering brilliance that goes into the design and fabrication of a state-of-the-art chip like the M5.

 

[Macmelman]

Incremental to last year? Sure. To 2-4 years ago? Major update. We want incremental upgrades most years so our devices don't end up hugely outdated too quickly.

Also keep in mind that something as small as a 15% increase in single core performance on a benchmark is 15% faster than the previous year's CPU. It's an exponential effect over time.

I have a MBP intel i7 16" from late 2019 that I bought at the beginning of 2020, so about to turn 6 years old. It works like a charm for the kind of work I do: office stuff, presentations, internet browsing, e-mails... It is not outdated for what I use it for. I even have Windows 10 installed in a bootcamp partition to play some old PC games I like. For most people, a computer does not get outdated in a couple of years unless you need the highest absolute performance. So if you got a Mac a couple of years ago and you use it like I do, you do not need the new one.

 

[theluggage]

Apple really needs to rethink their naming scheme and make it more consistent throughout all products. A Pro device should always have a Pro chip, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

So, the M4 Max MacBook isn't "pro"? 🙂

It's a mistake to read too much into "pro" label beyond "super-duper deluxe" but I agree it's getting a bit of a mess. I think the main problem is Apple's "processor naming" system of "Mx (no-name)/Pro/Max/Ultra" which does need to convey something (increasing performance on multi-threaded/GPU/memory-bandwidth workloads which can be 'wasted' on single-threaded CPU-heavy tasks). This causes the nonsense of having "pro" machines without "pro" chips, having two "better" chips than the "pro" and (trivial but annoying) making it cumbersome to distinguish between "M4"
meaning the whole M4 generation or just referring to the "base" M4.

I think Intel had a slightly better system (the names, not the chips!) with i3/i5/i7/i9/Xeon referring to target applications rather than chip generations. (Roughly, i3: Personal productivity, i5: general purpose; i7 Media creation; i9 Serious gaming; Xeon: server/workstation).

 

[Siliconguy]

I think Intel had a slightly better system (the names, not the chips!) with i3/i5/i7/i9/Xeon referring to target applications rather than chip generations. (Roughly, i3: Personal productivity, i5: general purpose; i7 Media creation; i9 Serious gaming; Xeon: server/workstation).

They had a good system but they didn't follow it. Dual core CPUs with hyper threading showed up as i3, i5, and i7. Then an i3 showed up with six cores in the 2018 mini. Logically it should have been i7, four cores with hyper threading; i5, four cores no hyper threading; i3 two cores with hyper threading; Pentium, two cores no hyper threading; Celeron one core with hyper threading; Atom, one core no hyper threading.

They you could go up the same way so i9 would be six cores without hyper threading the all the double digits could have hyper threading so I-value just becomes core count.

But logic and Marketing have never gotten along.😉

 

[Siliconguy]

They had a good system but they didn't follow it. Dual core CPUs with hyper threading showed up as i3, i5, and i7. Then an i3 showed up with six cores in the 2018 mini. Logically it should have been i7, four cores with hyper threading; i5, four cores no hyper threading; i3 two cores with hyper threading; Pentium, two cores no hyper threading; Celeron one core with hyper threading; Atom, one core no hyper threading.

They you could go up the same way so i9 would be six cores without hyper threading the all the double digits could have hyper threading so I-value just becomes core count.

But logic and Marketing have never gotten along.😉

 

[Kingcoherent]

The CNet review had an interesting finding. The Procyon stable diffusion benchmark can complete on battery life alone for the m5 (whilst on the m4 the battery runs out before it completes).

Unfortunately I can't find detailed results for the M5 anywhere - so this isn't a very useful benchmark for me (it's pay to use rather than open source). I believe the results for m4 can be found here. They don't include Nvidia, so again limited use. However, we do see that the m4 leads the class for laptops already.

I'm very excited for the Max and Pro variants of this chip, and I am (just about) happy to wait.

 

[nylon]

Interesting tidbit. The GPU Geekbench (metal/opencl) scores on this new 14" M5 now beats the one on my 14" M1 Pro with 16 core GPU.

 

[FlyingTexan]

So still using my 14" m1 Pro. Guess I'll wait again. Performance isn't an issue since it's a daily driver.

 

[Kingcoherent]

So still using my 14" m1 Pro. Guess I'll wait again. Performance isn't an issue since it's a daily driver.

The M series chips are great, and if didn't (try to) do so much deep learning work on my M2 Air I would keep it for ages. I think the better speakers in the Pro, the SD card slot and the HDMI port do mean that all round it's a much better offering for me than the air. I use an iPad Pro M4 with Magic Keyboard whenever I need to travel light (and if for work, it's just doc editing and email). The extra mass would be annoying but it's still fairly light compared to the 16, which was a bit of a beast (whilst it does have better thermal behaviour it's not a deal breaker for me). I actually think the 14 Pro is a sweet spot for performance and portability - but if your compute requirements aren't that high I can see an m1 lasting for ages.

 

[AltecX]

Looks like it's a mild upgrade for the M1 Pro 10core even. Can't wait to see what the M5 Pro puts down. May be time to upgrade.

 

[anthonymoody]

Pretty wild that single core is now nearly 2x that of the M1 series. Once it gets to 4600 or so, probably in the M6, we'll be there.

 

[Techwatcher]

Apple really needs to rethink their naming scheme and make it more consistent throughout all products. A Pro device should always have a Pro chip, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I get that “Pro” is mostly marketing by Apple, but seriously, at least stick to it. They’re doing the same thing with the iPad Air. “Air” used to mean the thinnest and lightest model, yet they released the M4 iPad Pro, which is actually thinner than the Air.

This should have 0 dislikes. Great to see that there are so many people on here that hate the concept of logical reasoning but I’m not surprised.

 

[ghanwani]

You should be asking Dr. Who, he does a lot of that

Don't know who that is. Have a link you can share?

 

[SoldOnApple]

No tandem OLED is a shame, but micro LED is still a nice touch in 2025. It's also the bare minimum for a MacBook Pro this price..

 

[radz974]

Looks like a really great computer for people with older MacBooks.

I will replace my Intel iMac with a MacBook pro M5. I waited 5 generations on purpose I didn't want to take the plunge into a new technology and platform.

 

[delsoul]

Paying devils advocate on this…

I do presentations to clients, connecting to their projector/screen, they only ever have hdmi to offer me. When I had the touch bar Pro, it drove me crazy needing a dongle for HDMI.

SD port. 100% agree, every camera I have owned and used going back forever has been CF, XQD and now CFExpress. However… many of my clients use cameras that offer SD slots and they get a lot of use from the built in readers.

That said, these days you can just connect the camera direct and use it as a card reader itself. But this type of functionality still doesn’t seem to have fully sunk in yet.

So I can see the pros and cons to both sides of this.

SD card slot is a godsend for me. Used my Pentax yesterday and Leica today, both with standard SD cards for storage. Pull them out, pop them into my MBP M1P and offload them. Much easier than dealing with yet another dongle, etc. I don’t use them anymore but I also used to use the SD card slot on the MBA I used to have a long time ago as an external storage device with those specialty short memory cards that sit flush with the body. I only stopped using those because i needed to swap cards too often. Otherwise, a permanent SD card in the slot is a great use for it if people don’t use it in general

 

[Zeeshee]

It seems Apple just using software to unlock more cpu and gpu cores in same chip every year and keep on renaming chip number

 

[darngooddesign]

It seems Apple just using software to unlock more cpu and gpu cores in same chip every year and keep on renaming chip number

It's physically different from the M4.