M4 vs M5 MacBook Pro: Here’s how I made up my mind

Performance is the killer feature for creative professionals. The faster you can render an animation file, export Adobe Lightroom photos, or do something crazy like create your own large language model for artificial intelligence, the more time you save. For most creatives, a workflow that’s faster and more efficient can literally generate more income–and reduce stress.

As a writer and photographer, I use a 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro on a daily basis, and the time has come to consider an upgrade. I know in the back of my head that Apple has been pushing the envelope lately, and I also know the new MacBook Pro M5 is significantly faster.

How much faster? Apple says for AI tasks like the large language model database I mentioned, you can expect speed improvements on the order of 3.5 times faster than the M4 version. The M5 is also 6 times faster than the original M1 model, released back in 2020. The new 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro costs $1,599/£1,599, which is not exactly an impulse purchase.

That’s why I decided to do some of my own workflow tests using apps like Blender and Adobe Lightroom. Then I “crunched the numbers” using benchmarking apps like Geekbench AI and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. While I wasn’t always blown away by the performance improvements, there were a few shocking revelations. I used macOS 26.1 on both machines, and they were both outfitted with 16GB of RAM (coincidentally, both are Space Black).

I offer my impressions after explaining the results from each test, along with whether I am ready to spring for the new machine.

Creative workflows

For testing the creative process, I picked tasks that tend to be time-consuming and slow me down. On my M3, I may have cursed the engineers at Apple just a little as I’ve waited for my photos to export out of Adobe Lightroom, for example. It feels like an eternity when an event organizer is texting and emailing you multiple times asking for the final shots. I also built a song in GarageBand and mastered the audio file, then tried a Blender animation render.

I use Adobe Lightroom on a daily basis. It’s my main photo editing and management app, so I rely on it extensively and know the features inside and out. I own a trusty Canon 5D Mark II but I happened to be reviewing a high-end Nikon Z5 camera. I covered an event recently and took 562 photos with the Z5. After loading the photos onto both MacBooks, I imported the new shots, did some editing, and then exported the results as JPG files to the local drive.

Overall, Lightroom seemed snappy on the M5 compared to the M4. I recall doing my edits and seeing the results instantly appear; with the M4 (and definitely with my own M3) there would often be a slight delay at times. For the mass export, the MacBook Pro M5 was about 10 seconds faster than the M4 model. The M5 clocked in at 55.96 seconds to export the 562 photos; the M4 took 1 minute 6.4 seconds to export the same files.

I’m also a musician and have played guitar for many years. I love the fact that Apple still includes GarageBand on a new MacBook Pro like the M5 and I tend to get lost in the creative process. I added multiple drum tracks, piano, and a few other instruments to a new song. To stress test the MacBooks, I duplicated the tracks to make a massive file.

The test results were similar to what I experienced with Lightroom. My song exported about 10 seconds faster using the M5, which is a good time savings if you are creating multiple audio files during the course of the day. The M5 took 56.01 seconds to generate an AAC file, while the M4 took 1 minute 5 seconds. This real-world testing is more valuable to me than a benchmark app, which I will cover in a moment, because the numbers are more meaningful to me. I want to be able to do real work and then track how much time I’d save with the new machine.

I can’t say I use Blender on a regular basis, but I have great aspirations to learn this app more thoroughly, especially as a way to combat all of the AI slop around today. My goal is to learn how to do actual animation work before it becomes a lost art form. This type of stress test is also a good one for the MacBook Pro because it requires rendering multiple files. I used a demo project from Blender that involves rendering dozens of 3D models.

The test results were not all that different between the M4 and M5 laptops. The M5 rendered the models in 9:45 minutes while the M4 took 9:55 minutes. This seemed like an eternity to me, but then I looked up how long 3D models can take to render and it’s sometimes closer to an hour or more. I wasn’t as impressed with the speed difference between the M5 and the M4, though, and started to question how much faster the new machine is.

Benchmarking apps

In many ways, workflow testing is more subjective. The two MacBooks seemed similar in terms of performance when I ran my own tests using Lightroom and GarageBand, and I wasn’t blown away by the speed differences. When I ran three benchmarking apps, I realized there is a remarkable speed difference after all, especially doing AI- and GPU-related tasks. That matches up with what Apple has stated, that the speed gains are related to those activities. Note: For these benchmark tests, I will report only on the actual benchmarking results.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

This app is intended to show you the performance for a local disk, but of course, that is also dependent on the CPU, which has to process all of the file transfers. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a free utility, and it reported that the M5 read and write speeds are significantly faster than the M4. My test results (which match those from the M5 MacBook Pro review) for the M5 for write speed was 6440MBps, and for read speed, it was 6725.6MBps. For the M4, the write speed was only 3265.3MBps, and the read speed was 2904MBps. That means the M5 write speed is 97 percent faster than the M4 and the read speed is 131 percent faster. That’s a big gain.

Here’s the more jaw-dropping result from all of my testing. Geekbench lets you test AI processing speed for the CPU, GPU and neural engine. I chose the GPU processing for this, but all of the results were better on the M5 compared to the M4. The quantized score averages the single-precision and half-precision tests. The M5 quantized score was 23628, while the M4 quantized score was only 11616. That’s roughly twice as fast as the previous MacBook.

3DMark Solar Bay Extreme

3DMark offers a free benchmarking app that lets you run a gaming test called Solar Bay Extreme. Basically, it’s a GPU test that shows you the frames per second (fps). The M5 clocked in at 101 fps on frame 300 and generally held about 100 fps during the entire benchmark. The M4 ran at 70 fps on frame 300 and throughout most of the test, sometimes dipping into the low 60s. That means the frame rate on the M5 was about 50 percent faster than the M4 for game rendering. Gamers, you will love using a MacBook Pro M5.

My decision: M5 MacBook Pro

I’m sold. I knew going into the testing that the benchmarking apps would reveal a major performance increase over the previous model. I wasn’t as impressed with my own workflow results, even if saving 10 seconds for exports and renders isn’t exactly unimpressive. In the end, the M5 was at least 50 percent faster on some tests and even as high as 2 times faster compared to the M4. I could see myself making the jump to see those performance gains.

You may find a really good deal on the M4 MacBook Pro though, in which case, that may well influence your decision: