Apple’s new M5 Max feels like a huge upgrade if you bought your laptop three years ago

We’ve been busy testing many new MacBooks, ranging from the new $1,099 M5 MacBook Air, going all the way up the $6,149 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip. While these computers are identical in design to last year’s models, they have some things in common: neither delivers a significant lead over their M4 counterparts, although their faster SSDs might be enough reason for folks 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.

The biggest actual change: Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver “up to 2x” the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 laptops. Our testing bore that out: the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed. That’s 86 percent faster reads and 123 percent faster writes than the 4TB drive on our M4 Max review unit. My colleague Antonio G. Di Benedetto saw similar results in the 2026 MacBook Air with the M5, as well as 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 4TB SSD. The M4 Max version we tested in late 2024 had 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 type of core: the super core, and it also redesigned its performance cores. The M5 Max has six super cores and 12 of the new performance cores, “optimized for power-efficient, multi-threaded workloads.” The efficiency cores aren’t gone — they’re still on the base M5 chip — just not on the Pro or Max.

In single-core CPU tests, the new super core gives the M5 Max an eight or nine percent edge in benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and Cinebench. That’s pretty typical for a year-over-year generational gain. Multicore is where it gets a bit weird. The M5 Max is about 10 percent faster in Geekbench CPU multicore and 14 percent faster in Cinebench 2026, but it has 12.5 percent more cores. We’ll have to do more testing — especially in workloads that stress more cores for longer durations — but so far it looks like those 12 performance cores in the M4 Max help it keep up with the six super cores on the M5 Max.

GPU improvements are a little more straightforward, with the GPU cores in the M5 Max delivering a 26 percent improvement with the OpenCL framework, and a smaller but still appreciable 18 percent improvement with Metal graphics rendering. It shaved eight seconds from our 4K Premiere Pro export test compared to the M4 Max, or about a 10 percent difference.

Obviously, nobody’s upgrading from an M4 Max to an M5 Max, and the M5 Max’s performance improvements are a lot more impressive when you look at older laptops. Compared to the 12 CPU core / 38 GPU core M2 Max from 2023, single CPU core performance in Geekbench 6 for the M5 Max is 55 percent faster, while multi-core performance nearly doubled. Metal rendering performance in a GPU test showed a 64 percent improvement in the M5 Max versus the M2 Max. And the M5 Max cut Premiere Pro 4K export time of our five-minute, 33-second video by a full 30 percent — doubtless also helped by faster write speeds.

The performance gains of the M5 Max are substantial enough to make a night-and-day difference if you’re used to a laptop with the 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-gen MacBook Pros aren’t missing out on a ton, save for the incredibly fast read/write SSD speeds. But if you bought the M2 Max three years ago and you’re already pushing it to its limits, the M5 Max looks like a significant upgrade. Stay tuned for our full review.