A new laptop from Apple arrives carrying the most powerful silicon yet placed in a portable machine, and with it the old question of what raw speed is worth when the price climbs past five thousand dollars. The reviewer found a computer that outruns its rivals in rendering and compiling, yet that strength meets a physical limit, a cooling system housed in an aluminum body that has changed little in nearly five years. It is a machine that asks its buyer to weigh ambition against endurance and cost against need.
Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro Packs Stunning Power Into a Familiar, Costly Shell
Too powerful for its own good
Mark
The headline number is 50 fps in Cyberpunk. Why does that matter?
Mimi
Because he compared it to a laptop with an RTX 5080 and an Intel chip. A MacBook with no discrete GPU got into that territory.
Mark
But it didn't stay there.
Mimi
Right. After a few minutes the fans kicked in and it fell to about 37 fps. His conclusion was that the machine outruns its own cooling.
Luke
I'd flag that as one reviewer's observation about one game. The piece doesn't tell us how the drop varies across other workloads.
Mark
And the price?
Mimi
$3,600 to start, $5,850 for his configuration with 128GB, 4TB and the nano-texture screen.
Luke
Worth noting the M5 Pro 14-inch starts at $2,200. The review doesn't say how much performance you lose there, so we can't call it the better deal.
Mark
What about Apple's claims?
Luke
Things like 5.4 times faster effects rendering versus the M1 Max are Apple's figures. The Blender, Cinebench and HandBrake results are the reviewer's own tests.
Mimi
And the 26 seconds versus under four in Blender is a striking one of those.
Luke
Striking, yes, though it's a single scene, against a single AMD laptop.
Der Puls
- A gaming test that should have ended in a crash instead ran near 50 fps, startling the reviewer with what the chip could do.
- Within minutes the fans roared and frame rates sagged to about 37 fps, exposing a chassis strained beyond its design.
- Benchmarks put the M5 Max ahead of rival laptops in Blender, Cinebench and Geekbench, a lead Apple is using to court M1 owners.
- A starting price of $3,600 climbs to $5,850 with the reviewed options, while a $2,200 M5 Pro model waits as the sensible alternative.
- The unresolved question is whether sustained performance holds under fan load, with the notch and old shell still standing as reminders of an aging design.
A new laptop from Apple arrives carrying the most powerful silicon yet placed in a portable machine, and with it the old question of what raw speed is worth when the price climbs past five thousand dollars. The reviewer found a computer that outruns its rivals in rendering and compiling, yet that strength meets a physical limit, a cooling system housed in an aluminum body that has changed little in nearly five years. It is a machine that asks its buyer to weigh ambition against endurance and cost against need.
The reviewer opened Cyberpunk 2077 on Apple's new 14-inch MacBook Pro, pushed the settings toward Ray Tracing Ultra, and kept MetalFX upscaling on, expecting a crash. Instead the game held around 50 frames per second, roughly what a high-end gaming laptop with an RTX 5080 would deliver. The good feeling did not last. Within minutes the fans climbed and the frame rate fell to about 37 fps, and repeated tests with the fans at full force pointed to a cooling system that cannot keep up with the chip, housed in an aluminum shell nearly five years old.
The price tells its own story. The base model starts at $3,600, and the review unit, with a 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, 4TB of storage and a nano-texture display, reached $5,850. A 14-inch M5 Pro begins at $2,200, a far gentler path into the same family.
The benchmarks are where the machine earns its keep. Its split-die Fusion Architecture and new neural accelerators let it render a BMW scene in under four seconds, where an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 needed 26, and it outscored rival chips in Cinebench and Geekbench. Apple is clearly courting owners of older M1 machines. The body is familiar: three Thunderbolt 5 ports, MagSafe charging, a notch clashing with macOS 26, and still no USB-A. The reviewer's final concern is sustained performance, since a peak this high means little if the shell cannot carry it.
The reviewer loaded Cyberpunk 2077 on Apple's new 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro, pushed it toward Ray Tracing Ultra settings, left MetalFX upscaling switched on to give it a chance, and half expected a crash. Instead the game ran at around 50 frames per second at a moderately high resolution. That is roughly what he usually gets from a gaming laptop with a high-end Intel chip and a mobile Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080.
The result did not hold. Within a few minutes the fans spun up and the frame rate sank to about 37 fps. After repeated tests, with the fans pushing as hard as they would go, he concluded the machine is too powerful for its own cooling, a limit he ties to an aluminum chassis that is nearly five years old.
Then there is the price. The 14-inch M5 Max starts at $3,600 with an 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB of memory and 2TB of storage. Apple's review unit had the 40-core GPU and 128GB of unified memory, which together bring the cost to $5,100. Add 4TB of storage and the $150 nano-texture display and the total is $5,850. Cheaper options exist. A 14-inch with the M5 Pro starts at $2,200, which is $1,400 less, with a 15-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage. The 16-inch M5 Pro starts at $2,700, and the 16-inch M5 Max at $3,900.
The benchmarks are where the machine earns its cost. The M5 Max tops out at 18 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, against 16 and 40 on the M4 Max, a gain made possible by splitting CPU and GPU onto separate dies in what Apple calls Fusion Architecture. Apple also added neural accelerators to each GPU core and more ray tracing capability. In a Blender test rendering a BMW scene, AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in an Asus ProArt PX13, also with 128GB of memory, took 26 seconds. The M5 Max finished in under four. In Cinebench 2026 multi-core it scored more than 1,000 points higher than that AMD chip, and in Geekbench 6 multi-core it beat Intel's Core Ultra 9 285HX by 7,000 points. It also topped the Core Ultra X9 388H. A HandBrake 4K-to-1080p transcode took just under a minute, twice as fast as an M4 MacBook Air and a minute and a half faster than the AMD chip.
In 3DMark Steel Nomad it scored 3,880, about 1,000 points above a Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 with an RTX Pro 2000 and close to 700 above a Razer Blade 14 with an RTX 5070. Apple claims up to 2.1 times the gaming performance of the M1 Max, and up to 2.4 times faster code compiling and 5.4 times faster effects rendering. The reviewer's point is that Apple is now aiming this chip at M1 owners, much as earlier models targeted holdout Intel Mac users.
The body is familiar. The Pro and Max models add three Thunderbolt 5 ports, with transfer speeds up to 120GB/s and charging up to 240W. There is also MagSafe 3 with a 96W adapter, which reaches 50% in 30 minutes, a claim the reviewer confirmed. The laptop keeps HDMI 2.1, a headphone jack and a full-size SDXC slot, but still no USB-A. New are an N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and SSD speeds up to 12GB/s. The M5 Max can drive four external monitors. At 3.56 pounds it is the heaviest 14-inch, since it carries a sturdier cooling system, though its twin fans were barely audible over a nearby radiator.
The display is the same Liquid Retina XDR mini LED panel, 3,024 x 1,964 at 254 PPI, with the same notch, which clashes with macOS 26 Tahoe's clear menu bar. The reviewer found the nano-texture option only dulled brightness indoors and advises most buyers to skip the $150. The six-speaker system remains among the best in this size class, though the Dell XPS 14 comes close and has thinner bezels.
What to watch is sustained performance. Peak numbers are remarkable, but the drop to 37 fps suggests the old shell is the constraint, and an RTX 5080 laptop still wins for gaming.
Bemerkenswerte Zitate
The reviewer advises most buyers to skip the $150 nano-texture display, finding it only dims the screen indoors.— Gizmodo reviewer
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