I've been covering a lot of laptops lately, but for the most part, they've
been pretty Windows-focused. And in fact, I have spent perhaps an embarrassingly small amount of time on
the Mac ecosystem. My partner has a MacBook. I've done a couple of videos a
few years back on Mac gaming, but I've really not spent any time living with a
MacBook, especially not a MacBook Pro. So, today
we're taking a look at the MacBook Pro M5 Pro.
Wow. They're such nice laptops. Like, I get it. I get it. Apple cares so much
about the feel of the laptop, perhaps too much, but you know, when you're
right, you're right. It just feels so sturdy. It's heavy, but it's like it's rigid, you know? And it comes with a
more closely color-matched cable,
MagSafe and USBC, and then your usual
stuff, plus your really mediocre Honestly, this is something they need to
redesign, is the charger. It's huge. I've I've I've always hated the wall
wart approach. I am Okay, why isn't it black?
You did this, why didn't you do this? You know what? I actually have a question for the audience. Would you
prefer if all of your laptop chargers were bricks that plugged into the wall,
or do you like the cable to a loose power brick to a USB? This is going to
block some other stuff for me, and I hate that. Also, it falls out. I would
love to have it be grounded just to have better grip.
Honestly, it's Do you know? Apple, I hate you. You know what else I hate? The
fact that this doesn't light up anymore. They need to bring that back. I think that they should 100% bring back the
light up logo. If they do that, I think they would like legit increase their
sales by like 5 to 10%. Like, make the Air The Air doesn't come with the light
up one, just the Pros. People are going to buy the Pros just cuz they light up.
But you know, because the back doesn't light up, I guess that's the perfect opportunity for us to take a look at a
dbrand skin from our sponsor dbrand. Whoa, they got the retro look. Do I have
to apply this? And this is their 1984 space black skin. And it's got that
classic Apple logo, except for it's just a little different. This skin is
designed to remind you of a simpler time when computer companies made computers
before all this AI, metaverse, and NFT, and web 3.0 nonsense. If you know
somebody who's still on web 3.0, you need to dump them. That's We're on like
web 4.0, okay? We're like way ahead. >> Web 3 people are people, too. No,
they're not. Wow. That looks amazing. There are eight
different colorways, one for pretty much every modern MacBook color, and we've got the space black one here. But,
they've also got colorways for your space gray, your silver, your starlight, your midnight, your indigo, blush, or
citrus MacBook as well. They support both new and old MacBooks, 27 models in
total. So, if you want Dbrand to make your MacBook look like it was produced
in 1984, head on over to shortlinus.com.
That looks pretty slick, and it is picking up way fewer fingerprints than
the usual aluminum on these MacBooks. So, that's pretty sick. Speaking of
aluminum, what do we find on the aluminum body of this MacBook? We got a
MagSafe charger, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, a combo audio jack, and on the
other side we get one more Thunderbolt 5 port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a UHS-II SD
card reader. That's a fast one. The speedy. I still would love to see one
USB-A port or one more USB-C port on any
MacBook, please. It's just the harsh truth. Most people got one USB-A device.
But, the good news is that Apple is kind of the king of trackpads, and this one
hopefully has a nice new trackpad. Honestly, I know this is a 14-in laptop.
It feels like everyone else is like overcompensated on the size of trackpads
these days, cuz this kind of feels like normal size. Cuz trackpads used to be
like kind of like a 3-in by like 2-in thing, and now they're much bigger
because people actually want to use them. And Apple led the way, but it just
feels so modest on here. We got the typical MacBook Pro keyboard with pretty
low travel, but has a nice clickety-clackety. I've always found
that the MacBook keyboards [music] are pretty nice, obviously excluding the time where they had the butterfly
switches that were breaking all the time. At the top right corner, we get our touch ID. Of course, you get the
usual backlit keys as well as the scrunched up arrow keys. And I just You
got the space. Just listen, every laptop manufacturer, just do this.
And then give your full-height keys, and then you get two bonus keys. You can put whatever you want here. One key for
hopes and one for dreams. [music] Yeah, yeah, we need those in a time like
this. On the sides, we have the location of the often noted to be excellent
MacBook speakers. And we have still the annoying, stupid cutout. They don't have
Face ID on these, do they? Mhm. That's so stupid. Oh my god. I No
[snorts] one needs to watch another crash out over this idiotic spot. If it had Face ID, I could forgive a lot. It
just the fact that it doesn't. I have not spent any time on Macs since they
added liquid glass. Maybe this is just cuz I've been conditioned from like
Windows Vista and Windows 7 with the arrow look. I think it fits a lot better
on the desktop than it does on mobile. But maybe that's just cuz they're a
little bit less obtrusive. Like look at the settings menu. They got They finally
got Windows Snap. Silent, man. Ain't nothing going on down there. Oh,
so the display, it's still the same high-quality display found on the
MacBook Pro M4, [music] which means that it is also still a mini
LED display. But you get a 120 Hz variable refresh rate, and it's got
1,600 nits of peak brightness and HDR on this display, which I'm yet to see in an
OLED screen laptop. Though, I do hope that we'll be seeing an OLED MacBook
screen soon. But because of how nice this mini LED display looks, I can see
why they haven't ditched it. It's still really, really good. And also like early
OLED, you have all the color fringing. If you want a few more details on this display, go check out our video on the
MacBook Pro M4, where we took a look at basically the identical display and did
way more testing on it. What the hell was that? Did you see Ew.
And like why did it slide to the side? Like oh. Cuz now it's a full new
desktop, so it slides over. Yeah, I know. It's stupid. I should make sure to
acknowledge that just cuz it isn't how I'm used to it >> [music]
>> doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
I can do it that way. See, this is what I was wanting. Cuz then I want cuz I'll
want like I don't know, games. I want this to be open and then I want to be able to just like kind of pull it up.
I'm a busy dude. And it's like running pretty good. I'm using Oh, we got some
pretty gnarly screen tearing there. Yeah, man. These MacBook speakers, they
sound so good. Sorry. I'm sorry. I had a I had a Arrest
me. You don't have to kill me. Apparently, Crimson Desert had it on
that. Really? But we were getting better performance than on other upscalers, but
like FSR 3 looks a little bit better than Metal. But and there you can finally hear the fans. From my
experience with Macs, they find that they have quite a large hysteresis curve, which is like they wait a really
long time for your temperature to get high before they actually kick in the
fans. Just kind of like hoping that maybe it's just going to be a short second and it won't really matter. But
they still even with that, they still do a good job of making these fans sound
just like less uh whiny and annoying. Though, I'm sure that these aren't even
close to their full speed. And that actually brings me to another point that differentiates the Pro version of the
MacBook Pro compared to the non-Pro version of the M5 MacBook Pro. And that
is both of the fans in here exist and
are doing things to help cool it off. Because we have a much larger GPU. We
have a 15-core CPU, a 16-core GPU, 24 gigs of included RAM. There's kind of
some weirdness with the RAM specs on these things where like you can't get 36
gigs on this. You would need to go to a Max or the higher-level Pro CPU to get
36 gigs of memory. I'm sure it's something to do with which parts of the
SOC are activated between the different SKUs, but something to note. This also
comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 and it seems pretty fast. Also, at the base
level for the M5 Pro MacBook Pro, you
get a full terabyte of solid-state
storage. It is getting toasty on the bottom here, though. Cuz the intakes are here
and it all comes up through the screen. And it's getting hot on the keyboard of
it. But they do a good job of mitigating it to the top of the keyboard and the homer of still feels pretty chill.
So funny to me that this is how it's still how you install stuff. But I actually think it makes a ton of sense
from a usage perspective. It literally forces you to acknowledge where you are
installing something. And one thing that I find super annoying about Windows is the fact that like everything
will just go like wherever. And the fact that like both in most Linux distros and
on Mac, everything just goes in the application folder. And I think it makes things way cleaner. So, we got Cyberpunk
running here, and this is an exact demonstration of my point. Look at it. We're running at 92 93° on our CPU. And
on our GPU 96 97 98. The fans sitting at
39 to 40%. The delay is huge. We're at
almost 100°. It's probably hottest GPU 94 99. Just about to cross 100. Now,
finally, the fans are slowly ramping up to cool
the laptop. If we actually want to take these all the way to max speed, this is what you
get. This is the MacBook they don't want you to know about.
Now that we've been running the fans at 100%, our CPU and GPU are sitting at a
far more reasonable 85-ish degrees. And we're also now able to pull 56 W
on our processor instead of the 40 W
that it was throttling down to. So, we're actually probably getting better
performance in Cyberpunk. I don't have an FPS counter up here, but it's just an
interesting choice that Apple will choose to let your performance throttle
rather than like let you realize that your computer is working as hard as it
is. I think it's a choice that makes a lot of sense for the average consumer,
maybe the low-end MacBook Pros. I think it's pretty frustrating to see this kind
of behavior on like the M5 Pros and the M5 Maxes of the world. If you're
spending that much on a laptop and desiring that much performance, there's
no reason to like hide the fact that it needs to work, you know? Maybe I just
have a different perspective than other MacBook owners. I guess there is the appeal of like having this slick machine
that is powerful, but also quiet, but I think that it's annoying especially once
I've activated I've specifically activated high power mode on this thing
that it doesn't automatically let the fans rev up. We have the normal reflective
glass MacBook coating and here's their nano texture display. I will say it does
the thing that I've always found annoying of these nano texture displays
is it adds that weird like little like almost like noise. It has that kind of graininess and like noise to like solid
colors, but it's really doing a good job of having no reflections. There's
something that feels totally personal preference and I can see you leaning
either way. I think that non textured display that has some reflections when
you max the brightness, it doesn't matter so much and it looks really
really good. I think that the trade-offs in terms of viewing experience aren't
that bad on the nano textures. So really I think would I would just recommend you
get whatever is best tailored to the space that you're going to be using your
laptop. If you're somebody who's going to have a lot of lighting in a bright space, you might really want to consider
the anti-reflective coating. If you're not, don't worry about it cuz it is an option charge. Let's talk about results
first. Woah.
You ever seen that app before? I have not ever seen that before. It's a good
we're back. It might have something to do with the like ending that screen recording
ending. Who knows? That was kind of weird. Kind of crazy. But yeah, like honestly
playing Cyberpunk it's really it's high performance. [music] The screen looks great, but what does
Labs have to say about the performance of this thing? Let's talk about battery
which I guess I've kind of glossed over. The battery in the MacBook Pro M5 Pro
has 72.41 hours of size and in our battery test
where we stream a 1080p video at 200
nits of peak brightness in low power mode, the MacBook Pro M5 Pro gets 9
hours and 18 minutes of battery life which is a little bit worse than the non
Pro M5 MacBook Pro. God, these names.
But is a little bit better than the MacBook Air M5. Though the MacBook Air
M5 comes with a much smaller capacity battery. Honestly with the battery life
we're seeing from some of the Intel laptops,
I'm kind of surprised at how poorly these MacBooks are doing. That's not to
say that 9 hours of battery life isn't good. That's a full day's of work,
especially if your work involved streaming 1080p video all day. What a
job I'd love to have. The Apple should really start considering maybe increasing the battery size that they
have in these things. Like, look at their MacBook Neo, right? Like, that thing was like 90% battery. But, it
seems like Apple's just really finally been challenged on the battery endurance
front. And that's something that we haven't seen in years. Well, I wonder if
we I'm going to try Cinebench. If you let the fan drip, I wonder if we can beat the Cinebench score. Okay, look at
this. Cinebench 2026 multi-thread, default fan profile, 7,000
267. You crank the fans, 7,600. You're losing performance. Yeah,
it's not that much. Like, it's not that much. But, like, if you're somebody who's rendering a video and you got a
deadline, you might want that performance. Luckily, you can't just install the utility that lets you
control the fans. >> It's kind of annoying that you have to do it, but it's it's just it's just to prove my point. Oh, I used stats, Mac
dash stats. When it comes to Cinebench, the MacBook Pro M5 Pro looks pretty dang
good multi-threaded, but in single-core performance, you won't see any sort of
benefit as it's basically the same architecture. There's just more of it.
If we had gotten the 18-core version of the CPU, we would have likely seen a
little bit of a bump to the multi-core performance in Cinebench, but because
this is the same one as the previous MacBook Pro that we tested, it's not
that different. But, when we look at things like Adobe Premiere, that's where you really see the benefits of the large
GPU on the MacBook Pro. It It just blows
the non- Pro M5 out of the water. However, if you're doing something
that's more like Photoshop, you're not going to see nearly as much of a benefit. Though, also, I just want to
point out that the M5, the base M5, is better than the M1 Pro, despite the M1
Pro having substantially more GPU cores. Honestly, Apple's done a lot in just a few short years improving the
performance of their GPUs. In gaming, we should also see a pretty huge benefit.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the M5 Pro wipes the floor with both of the
comparison laptops here. Same with in Cyberpunk 2077. Having more GPU cores
that are more betterer is good. And the game looked pretty good. The game looked
pretty good when I was playing it. >> Unless you wanted to play Crab Rave.
>> I mean, I we know how good these sound. Yeah. They're the best speakers, and
then Dells maybe second. That is the MacBook Pro M5 Pro.
Uh not at all confusing name for your laptop. Though, the price also isn't
very confusing cuz it's going to be coming in at a whopping $2,200.
Which I think is kind of reasonable for
what you're getting. It's tough when I'm looking at stuff like the ZenBook Duo
from ASUS where I'm like you're getting two screens, a high-performing GPU and
CPU, and you're getting all of that for about the same amount of money. But,
also something to think about is that that ZenBook Duo, you're not going to be
able to resell that for nothing. This, you're probably going to be able to resell in a few years and people will
still want to use it. And I mean, like my partner, she still uses an M1
MacBook Air, and it's still good. I just don't know. MacBook you pay the Apple
tax. If you're comfortable with that, I don't see why this is bad. Also included
at that price point is a really, really nice screen. My thing is that Mac has
less and less going for it these days as x86 chips have finally caught up. Even
the software. Like think about all of the complaints that have come out about
the most recent versions of macOS. I guess it's better than Windows, which is
a pretty low bar, but the MacBook Pro, it's still awesome. It's still
expensive. And if you're not already on the Apple ecosystem, there's a lot of
great options that are currently present. Plus, you could save $500
on a regular M5. There's 100% a group of people here where that $500 to get the
better GPU is going to go a long way. And it's easier than spending like
whatever, $1,000 extra to get an M5 Max.
That one's actually $3,500. >> Yeah, like 3,500 for an M5 Max?
>> 3,600, really. I feel like it's changed. It used to be like who gets the MacBook?
Who gets the M Pro series? And now it's who gets the M Max series? There's people out there. Thank you so much for
watching this video. If If this, why don't you check out Elijah's impressions of the MacBook Air? Or maybe was it
Riley's impressions of the MacBook Neo? Because there's a whole bunch of new MacBooks and they're all very
interesting.