Why the new MacBook Pros are more revolutionary than they look

Apple's new M5 Pro and M5 Max-chipped MacBook Pros face a challenge. Our deputy editor was hugely impressed by the M5 Max machine, but the debate about whether to upgrade or wait is more present than ever when rumours suggest that M6 MacBooks could add OLED and touchscreen display tech.

Speculation about broader design changes make this month's M5 Pro and M5 Max releases look relatively iterative, but are they? A trio of Apple execs – Doug Brooks from Mac Product Marketing, Anand Shimpi from Platform Architecture and Aaron Coday from the Pro Workflow team – took time out to talk to me about why the latest MacBook Pros' leap in performance is no trivial matter for creatives in 2026.

For the first time, Apple has a laptop for almost everyone. The new MacBook Neo introduces the brand's first budget model, while the Airs continue to provide solid mid-tier value. The M5 Pro and M5 Max machines sit at the other end of the spectrum, aimed at the most demanding creative professionals who need a laptop that can handle things like 3D modelling, video editing, large batch exports and, increasingly, on-device AI.

As with previous generations, the latest Pros come with three options of chip: M5 (in a 14-inch only, released in October 2025), and now the M5 Pro and M5 Max, in both 14- and 16-inch form.

Doug thinks these "three discrete steps" provide a clear hierarchy: "If you look at our scale of architecture, it gives a nice step up in terms of going from M5 to M5 Pro, with double the GPU, double the unified memory bandwidth and capacity. From M5 Pro, M5 Max, you have that 40-core GPU and double the memory bandwidth again, so just tremendous performance on the graphics and AI side of things. I think it really gives you some natural points to jump in depending on your workflow."

Apple's latest chip architecture boasts the world's fastest CPU cores for up to 30 per cent faster performance compared to the M4 Pro/Max. The GPU has a neural accelerator in each core, delivering up to 4x AI performance compared to the M4 generation, and up to 8x compared to M1 models. M5 Max devices can be configured with up to 128GB of unified memory, while storage now starts at 1TB for M5 Pro and 2TB for M5 Max, and the SSD speed is up to twice as fast.

The numbers are striking, and Aaron says Apple's keenly aware of what they mean for creatives.

“Performance numbers are attractive but at the end of the day, my team thinks a lot about how that translates into how creatives can do their job better and faster, and it's a lot about how many iterations you can accomplish in a given time scale," Aaron says.

“If you've got two days to finish the project, the more iterations you can accomplish, the better your quality of product is generally going to be. That additional performance means I can iterate faster instead of waiting for the export over lunch to give to my director so that I can get feedback, and then I can iterate several more times over lunch potentially. It's not just a a benchmark number; it's about how we help the the customer iterate faster”.

For video editors, Aaron says the CPU and GPU improvements offer a meaningful difference in the time it takes to upscale footage edited in 1080p to 4K, for example. Meanwhile, photographers working in Lightroom should feel that doubling of SSD performance in such basic tasks as importing images to start culling.

As for 3D work, Apple's seen 1.3 to 1.7 times improvements in rendering speeds but also a jump in terms how many assets an artist can visualise in a scene layout thanks to the improvements in vertex processing.

But such leaps in performance don't only mean that creatives can do the same everyday tasks faster. They also open up new technical possibilities.

Anand says: "At a chip level, that sort of a step function gets you into the space where maybe it was technically possible to do something in the past, but once you start getting 4 or 6 times faster, now there are workflows you can see yourself using on these new chips. It's a performance feature, but it's also an enabling feature."

In terms of what it enables, one area where Aaron thinks creatives are keen to use all this extra power is to run on-device generative AI. One of Apple's demos for its new MacBook Pros was with ComfyUI, an open-source node-based interface that can function as a wrapper for multiple AI models. It can take advantage of those new neural accelerators and the big GPU and unified memory on the M5 Max.

"Creatives see where [generative AI] can be a valuable tool to accelerate their workloads, but they get a little bit nervous about running it elsewhere in the cloud," Aaron says. "When they can run it locally, there's more control, and that's powerful.

"Now you can imagine not only running a powerful 3D app or video editor, like Maya or Davinci Resolve, but running a local AI model maybe through LM Studio or comfyUI in the background.

"One of the use cases our team is looking at is doing layout for a scene in Blender. That's meticulous, labour-intensive work. To place 400 or 500 trees in a scene is normally a very manual process. Using LM studio and a local model, you can use that to guide and lay out the trees and then touch it up and move it around. While that's working in the background, you can be working on another shot somewhere else, either in Houdini or DaVinci Resolve or elsewhere."

Apple sees on-device AI as a benefit for a wide range of creatives, particularly when it's on a portable device that can be taken anywhere. For photographers on location, for example. "Imagine you're a sports photographer coming back to thousands of images. Being able to use local AI models means it doesn't matter if you don't have connectivity; you can use AI-assisted culling to choose your best images quickly wherever you are."

Will someone coming from an older M-chipped Mac feel the difference if they're not yet pushing their existing device to its limits, I wonder. For Anand, it's something you have to experience to realise.

“At the time, the performance cores on the M1 Pro and M1 Max were among the fastest you could buy while being still energy efficient and something that you could use in a notebook and still have great battery life with, so it's not surprising that you have users that are using those systems and are still very happy.

“But when you look at the four generations of innovation we put in, the fact that we're now taking those things that people are happy with and, in some cases, more than doubling the performance, or if you start using neural accelerators, you're talking about six times more performance, it's one of those things you have to experience.

"I remember when I had an M1 Max, the first time I upgraded to the M3 family, everything just felt faster immediately even though I was totally happy with my M1 Max, and I can only imagine going from that M1 Max to an M5 Max today.”

Aaron points out that it's not just CPU and GPU performance that makes the new Pros more 'pro' machines. There are also the connectivity and quality of life improvements that come with Thunderbolt 5 connectivity and the ability to now daisy chain two Studio Display XDRs.

"You can hang your peripherals and your storage drives off of that, and you have one cable to bring in to the MacBook Pro. It makes it a lot easier and more seamless to bring your machine to your desktop to do work and then still be able to go portable without having to connect four or five different cables".

Still is it not hard for someone who wants to buy a new MacBook in 2026 to decide whether to upgrade now or wait to see if the rumours have it right and we see an M6 by the end of the year?

For Doug, that's just one of the challenges of constant Innovation. "We're always working on bigger better faster. But, particularly if you're coming from an M generation, there's a point where you really want to jump in and take advantage of that productivity and capability. And with this generation, when you combine the increase in CPU, GPU and AI performance, technologies like Thunderbolt 5, bigger, starting storage capabilities and up to twice the performance of those SSD capabilities, these are really meaningful changes for creative workflows."

If you're struggling to decide which MacBook is for you, see our reviews of the M5 MacBook Pro and our first impressions of the M5 MacBook Air.