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Opening up a new MacBook Pro is always exciting. Especially as every year now we get a new processor too. For 2025 Apple has produced the M5, a CPU which looks broadly the same as the M4, just a little bit faster and with a bit more memory bandwidth. As these things were already very well developed in last year’s chip, what we get in the M5 is what Apple claims is the world’s fastest processing core, along with graphics and neural processing upgrades that should interest anyone who needs one of the best laptops for Photoshop or Premiere Pro.

It’s the usual beautifully packaged presentation from Apple too, with packaging as nice as a cardboard box can be. It’s not cheap, though, and you’ll have to order a charger separately if you need one, however, as there’s not one in the box by default. That’ll cost you £59 for the 70W and £79 for the 96W, so bear that in mind.

If you’re used to the MacBook Air or any of the current crop of thin and light laptops, the MacBook Pro can feel almost chunky. That’s not to say it’s unwieldy – the 14-inch form factor still gets you a decent screen in a chassis that will slip easily into a bag, but it’s a decent lump of metal to carry with you.

And it needs to be, as with the extra size and built-in fan it’s a step up in power over the passively cooled Air, an M5 version of which hadn’t been announced as the Pro landed on CB Towers’ doorstep.

There’s no change over last year’s MacBook Pro, with the same number of Thunderbolt ports in the same places and a lot of the same build-to-order options. It’s got Apple’s weird unmarked fingerprint reader at the top right of the keyboard – a key that’s perfectly functional yet somehow feels less refined than its equivalent on older iPads and iPhones – and there are speakers alongside the keyboard rather than trying to squeeze in a numpad.

It’s such a successful design that there’s little question over why Apple has stuck with it. It’s not flashy – the keyboard has a simple white backlight and the logo on the lid hasn’t lit up for years – yet perfectly functional. It’s everything a pro laptop should be, even if some of the features are starting to show their age.

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Design score: 4/5

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system’s potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU’s ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions’ Procyon software suite to test the system’s ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system’s ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system’s ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system’s ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Apple’s claims about the M5 containing its fastest processing core are born out by testing. In the graphs somewhere on this page you’ll see that Apple machines occupy the top five slots (at the end of 2025, anyway) in Geekbench’s single-core test results, with the M5 on top and the HP Omen Max 16’s Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX representing Windows in 6th place. That’s exceptional work from Apple’s silicon team, which is putting out a new chip every year and getting strong gains with each revision.

A big jump this year comes from the M5’s GPU, which puts on 10,000 points in Geekbench’s graphics tests over the M4 and now sits between an integrated Intel GPU like that in the Honor MagicBook Pro 14 and the discrete Nvidia chip in something like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI. It’s not a dedicated gaming chip, though Apple has made much of the release of Cyberpunk 2077 on Mac and the ray-tracing abilities of the M5 GPU, but it can hold its own, producing 60fps in the game if you set RT to low and use the upscaling and frame-gen tricks of the Metal graphics API mixed with AMD’s FSR.

All this means it’s excellent at the kind of graphics creatives specialise in. In Photoshop, the M5 MacBook Pro sits at the top of the ratings for our Pugetbench tests by quite some margin – unless you’re reading this in the future and the M6 has long knocked it off, of course. The same isn’t quite true of Premiere Pro, where Windows machines with thumping great GPUs show their worth by churning through moving pictures more quickly, but it’s ahead of anything using integrated graphics.

Apple’s decision to put neural accelerators in the M5’s GPU cores alongside the M-chips’ dedicated NPU has paid off in AI tests, with the Apple chip coming in close behind budget Nvidia cards in single and half precision, but streaking ahead in the quantised results that evaluate performance in real-world applications where speed and power efficiency are prioritised, such as facial recognition or voice assistants.

Apple is claiming 24 hours of battery life from the M5 laptop, and while that’s very optimistic, real-world usage is still surprising. Thanks to the low-power mode it’s possible to open the laptop with 100% charge and work for half an hour in a web app without it dropping at all. This naturally drops performance – it loses more than half its score in Geekbench’s single-core test – but extends battery life if you’re working on tasks that don’t require full power.

Performance score: 5/5

(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)

The MacBook Pro has never been a cheap laptop, but you can get on board for less than you might think. While the latest M5 ones start at £/$1,599, our test unit comes in at a slightly more faint-worthy £/$3,199. Once you start adding extras – the 4TB SSD in our review model comes with a particularly egregious price tag attached – the cost jumps up, and you’re going to want as much RAM as you can squeeze in, as this can’t be added over Thunderbolt.

Value score: 3/5

(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)

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