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The M5 MacBook Pro is my top pick for power users and deep-pocketed shoppers who want a MacBook with the nicest, most future-proofed specs. It’s overkill for the average person, but it’s worth the splurge for content creators, developers, AI enthusiasts, and other professionals with consistently demanding workloads. It’s available in one 14-inch size that makes it well-suited for on-the-go lifestyles.
As of March 2026, the M5 MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $1,699 — a $100 dip from its identically specced predecessor. (Apple no longer sells a $1,599 M5 MacBook Pro with 512GB of storage, but you can still find it in stock at third-party retailers like Amazon for the time being.) It maxes out with 32GB of RAM and 4TB of disk space, and there’s an optional nano-texture display upgrade that costs $150 extra.
Read Mashable’s full review of the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M5).
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Some creative professionals will look at the M5 MacBook Air and find its specs a little lacking — more “adequate” than “amazing.” For you, there’s the M5 MacBook Pro.
To date, this guy has the best performance-to-battery-life ratio out of any MacBook we’ve tested. In multi-core scenarios, it scored higher than more than 90 percent of the laptops in our current testing database, including many Windows laptops that cost more than $2,000. It’s only nine percent faster than the M5 MacBook Air when multitasking, but again, its fans make it better at handling chunky workloads over a long period of time. Thermal throttling is more likely with an Air.
The M5 MacBook Pro held out for 21 hours and 17 minutes in our battery life benchmark, lasting almost 30 percent longer than its M4 predecessor (an impressive gen-over-gen bump). It’s our battery life champ among MacBooks.
The M5 MacBook Pro is slightly less portable than the Air, but not by much. It’s less than 0.2 inches thicker than both sizes and 0.1 pounds heavier than the 15-inch model. This affords it enough room for extra fixings like an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, and a bonus Thunderbolt port, as well as an awesome hi-fi sound system with force-cancelling woofers. I’ve tested dozens of laptops over the course of my career, and none of them sound better than a MacBook Pro.
The M5 MacBook Pro looks as spectacular as it sounds, as per tradition. (Apple hasn’t made any drastic design changes to it since 2021.) Its mini-LED “Liquid Retina XDR” display offers a resolution of 3024 x 1964 pixels, a peak brightness of 1600 nits in HDR, and a 120Hz refresh rate. Compared to the M5 MacBook Air’s standard Liquid Retina screen, it’s crisper, brighter, and smoother when displaying visuals in motion — not necessary for all users, again, but very nice to have if you can swing the spend.
Take your pick from two finishes: space black or silver. Just be mindful that the former is a fingerprint magnet.