Fstoppers Reviews The Touchscreen Macbook Pro

Two weeks ago I spent over $7,000 on Apple's new touchscreen MacBook Pro. It finally showed up, so I put it side by side with the M3 Max MacBook Pro I've been using for the last two years. To be perfectly honest, I'm on the fence about whether I even want to keep it.

Smaller, Lighter, and the Glowing Logo Is Back

The new model is supposed to be smaller than the old one. Holding both, you can notice it, but it isn't a huge difference. It's slightly smaller and slightly lighter, which makes it a little more convenient to carry around. When the laptop is off, the Apple logo is reflective and looks a lot like my old laptop. Turn it on and the logo lights up, which is a small, silly feature I'm still happy to see return.

For context, here's what I'm comparing. My old laptop is an M3 Max with 36GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD that cost about $3,300 two years ago. The new one is an M5 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD, and it came to about $7,100.

I Still Don't Want to Touch My Laptop

This is the first Mac laptop ever made with a touchscreen. I personally have no interest in touching my laptop's screen, but I had a very specific reason to test it. I built an app called Better Dock, which replaces the macOS dock, and I wanted to make sure it works on every Mac, including this one.

Tapping to switch between apps works just like it does with the native dock. The problem is everything that depends on hovering. Better Dock has a lot of extra features that show up when you mouse over something, like the widgets that pop up more information. There's no hover with a finger, so when I tap one, the info flashes for a split second and disappears. It made me feel like my app was glitching, but it isn't. There's simply no way to mouse over anything with your finger.

That goes way beyond my app. macOS is full of things that reveal more information when you hover, and the web is even worse: video previews, menus that expand, tooltips. None of that works with a finger, and it's one more reason I don't see myself reaching for the screen. If you're a macOS power user with a ton of apps open and you keep losing track of them, give Better Dock a try. It's totally free.

The OLED Screen: I Honestly Can't See a Difference

The biggest upgrade this year is the display. For the first time on a Mac, this is a tandem OLED panel, so on paper we should get richer colors and much darker blacks. I went through the same images one by one on both laptops, and you're not going to believe me, but I could see no difference. I reshot the comparison later in complete darkness to make sure the room wasn't hiding anything, and it still looked the same to me.

When I checked the camera filming over my shoulder, the OLED did look better, and I think that's down to viewing angle. From any odd angle, the OLED clearly holds up better than the mini LED. But I've never in my life looked at my laptop from an odd angle, so that isn't worth much to me personally.

Next I ran a blooming test, which is a pure white dot on a pure black background. This is where mini LED is supposed to fall apart, with a glow leaking around bright objects. The screen on my old laptop is already so good that I don't see this as a significant improvement, at least for my work.

At full brightness, the new OLED is slightly brighter, which you'll appreciate if you work outside. I don't want this to sound like I'm putting down the new screen. It's literally the greatest laptop screen ever made. It just happens that the old one was unbelievably good too, and it's hard to improve on something that was basically perfect already.

"50% More Bass" Isn't Necessarily Better

Apple bragged about the speakers having 50% more bass, which is a strange statistic. There's no doubt the new laptop has more bass, but it isn't clean bass. It's coming out of tiny laptop speakers, so it can't be. To my ears the bass is too elevated and it muffles the mids. A few songs did sound a little better on the new laptop, but if you made me pick which speakers to live with for the next couple of years, I might choose the old one.

I also played my own voice back through Premiere on both, and the new model has a slightly muffled quality to it. I don't think it's a significant upgrade, and it might even be a step backward, which is a little depressing.

Performance in Premiere Pro

I don't really care about Geekbench scores. I care about what I do every day, and almost every day I'm exporting videos from Adobe Premiere. So I queued up the same exports on both machines.

With a basic export, the two came down to the wire and finished almost identically. Then I added two extremely resource-intensive effects, and the M5 Max was significantly faster.

The last test was one of Premiere's newest features, which uses AI to automatically select and track a subject frame by frame. It does an amazing job, but it's incredibly slow and hard on your computer. I tracked myself across a very long clip. I stepped out and missed exactly when the M5 Max finished, but when I came back, the M3 Max was only about halfway done. That's more than a 100% speed improvement on that one feature, and that is a significant improvement.

Heat, Fans, and Battery

My biggest worry with this redesign was throttling. Apple fit more into a smaller chassis, and thinner laptops usually run hotter. While I re-ran the AI test, the M5 Max stayed 100% silent with no fan at all. It felt warm to the touch, but that was it. When I finally did get the fans to spin up, they were still extremely quiet. With both laptops running their fans side by side, it wasn't an annoying sound at all.

Compare that to the Windows gaming laptop I tested a while back, where the fans were so loud I could barely hear its own speakers. Night and day.

Battery is harder to judge fairly. I started the performance tests with the M3 Max at 94% and the M5 Max at 79%, and by the end the M3 Max was at 31% and the M5 Max at 22%. Keep in mind the M3 Max has two years of use on it, so you'd expect some battery degradation there, and the new laptop was doing more work, faster.

Is It $7,000 Better?

Here's where I've landed. The new laptop is slightly smaller and lighter. The screen is incredible, but I can't really tell it apart from the old one, which was also incredible, so you'll be happy with either. The extra bass is real, but it overshadows the mids, and I might prefer my old speakers.

For my daily work of editing and exporting photos and video, if you aren't stacking a lot of effects, I'm not sure you'll see a big jump from this chip. Once you start layering effects and using AI tools that have to process every single frame, you'll notice a significant difference.

So is this laptop $7,000 worth of better? At the moment, the answer is clearly no, and I'm on the fence about keeping it.

I think my mind may change tomorrow, though. For the last week I've been completely rebuilding my workstation, with a new desk, four 5K monitors, and top-of-the-line peripherals, and all of it is going to run off this one laptop. That video comes out tomorrow, and that's when I'll decide whether I keep this thing or go back to old faithful.

If you're a photographer or videographer, I'd bet there's a dead hard drive or memory card sitting somewhere in your office that you're saving for the day you finally send it off for recovery. SalvageData sponsored this video, and they brought back an entire 16-drive server for us after three drives failed. They pay to ship your drive to them, and you only pay if they recover your data.