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We’ve been busy testing several new MacBooks, starting with The new MacBook Air M5 is priced at $1099all the way to the $6,149 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip. While these PCs are identical in design to last year’s models, they do have a few things in common: None of them offer a huge step up over their M4 counterparts, though their faster SSDs may be reason enough for people with older laptops to consider upgrading. We’ll have full reviews of both laptops soon; In the meantime, here’s how the M5 Max compares to its predecessors.
Biggest actual change: Apple claims its 2026 models can deliver “up to 2x” the sustained read and write speeds of M4 laptops. Our tests prove it: The 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro can sustain a read speed of 13.6GB/s and a higher write speed of 17.8GB/s. That’s 86 percent faster reads and 123 percent faster writes than the 4TB drive in our M4 Max review unit. My colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto had similar results in the 2026 MacBook Air with the M5, plus The M5-equipped MacBook Pro that we reviewed In late 2025 compared to its predecessor.
Our review configuration of the 16-inch MacBook Pro comes with an M5 Max chip with 18 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, 128GB of memory, and a 4TB SSD. The late 2024 version of the M4 Max we tested has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, but the same memory and storage allocations, making comparisons easy.
Here’s where it gets interesting: The M4 Max’s 16 cores are split between 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores. But for the M5 generation, Apple introduced a third Core Type: Super Core, it has also redesigned its performance cores. The M5 Max has six super cores and 12 new performance cores.Optimized for multi-threaded, energy-efficient workloadsThe efficiency cores haven’t disappeared — they’re still present on the base M5 chip — but not on the Pro or Max.
In single-core CPU tests, the new supercore gives the M5 Max an eight or nine percent advantage in benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and Cinebench. This is very typical for generational gains year after year. Multicore is where it gets a little weird. The M5 Max is about 10 percent faster in Geekbench multi-core CPU and 14 percent faster in Cinebench 2026, but it has 12.5 percent more cores. We’ll have to do more testing — especially on workloads that stress more cores for longer periods — but so far it seems like the M4 Max’s 12 performance cores are helping it keep up with the M5 Max’s six supercores.
The GPU improvements are somewhat more noticeable, with the M5 Max’s GPU cores offering a 26 percent improvement with the OpenCL framework, and a smaller but still noticeable 18 percent improvement with Metal Graphics Rendering. It shaved eight seconds off our 4K Premiere Pro export test compared to the M4 Max, or about a 10 percent difference.
Obviously no one is upgrading from the M4 Max to the M5 Max, and the M5 Max’s performance improvements are even more impressive when you look at older laptops. compared to 12 core CPU / 38 core GPU M2 max As of 2023, single-CPU performance in Geekbench 6 for the M5 Max is 55 percent faster, while multi-core performance has nearly doubled. Metal rendering performance in the GPU test showed a 64 percent improvement in the M5 Max versus the M2 Max. The M5 Max also cut the Premiere Pro 4K export time of a five-minute, 33-second video by 30 percent – no doubt also helped with the faster write speeds.
The M5 Max’s performance gains are significant enough to make a night-and-night difference if you’re used to a laptop with an M2 Max chip — less so if you’re using an M4 Max or even an M3 Max. That’s the takeaway here. People who bought the last generation MacBook Pro won’t miss out on much, except for the SSD’s incredibly fast read/write speeds. But if you bought the M2 Max three years ago and are already pushing it to its limits, the M5 Max feels like a significant upgrade. Stay tuned for our full review.