This year has been a bit of a weird one

when it comes to MacBooks. We have the

M5 as well as the rumored M6 lineup

coming out relatively close to each

other, which begs the question, should

you even bother with the M5 chip or just

wait for the M6? Then again, we have the

AI bros pumping up the RAM prices, so

it's not even a guarantee that the M6

lineup will be available. So yeah, in

this video, let's talk about the M5

MacBook Pro and how it's holding up

after 3 months of usage. And also, let's

run some comparisons against the M4 Air,

M4 Max, and M1 Pro chips. Now, let's go

over my specs quickly. This is my first

14-in MacBook Pro, which has been an

interesting experience, and it packs a

ton of power with 24 gigs of RAM and a 1

TB of storage with the base M5 chip. And

like with almost every other Apple

product that I have, of course, I had to

go with the silver color. I don't know,

to me, the silver just feels a bit more

cleaner than the space black. When it

comes to display size, I actually like

the 14-in model. You know, when I'm

working at my setup, I have my laptop

plugged into my monitor, but then the

14-in model gives me the freedom to just

pick up my laptop and go work at a

co-working space or even travel with the

laptop. Whereas [music] with the 16-in

model, any kind of movement becomes

really annoying. Also, the 14-in display

gives me enough screen real estate for

programming or editing. Although, if

you're somebody who needs multiple

windows open at a time, then just go

with the 16-in Pro or even the 15-in

Air. Trust me, a couple of inches make a

huge difference. In terms of colors and

brightness, I think MacBook Pros look

absolutely beautiful. They get so

bright, but also retain those nice

vibrant colors at the same time. This

year, the MacBook Pro display goes up to

1,600 nits of peak brightness while

watching HDR content and sustains a

thousand nits brightness otherwise. The

panel itself is still the same one from

last year with ProMotion going up to 120

hertz. So, when you're scrolling large

code files or reading articles, it's

going to feel smooth. Now, it is rumored

that the M6 lineup is going to feature

an OLED display as well as a

touchscreen, which sounds absolutely

insane. So, once the M6 lineup drops,

I'll be making some comparisons to the

M5 lineup, but to be honest, even this

year, you really can't go wrong with a

MacBook Pro display. Now, obviously, the

best part about the 14-in Pro model is

how light and compact it is while

bringing insane power with you anywhere

[music] you go. It fits well into any

one of my backpacks, and even when you

carry it for the whole day, you don't

feel like you have a brick in your

backpack, which is something that 16-in

Pro kind of feels like after a long day

of carrying it. Of course, it's only a 1

and 1/2 pound or 700 g weight difference

between the 14-in Pro and the 16-in Pro

model, but trust me, when you're walking

around the whole day with your laptop in

your backpack, that weight is going to

start adding up. Another thing where the

MacBook Pro lineup shines is, of course,

the port support. At first, you might

think this doesn't really matter, but

you'd be surprised how quickly you can

run out of ports. For example, you might

have your monitor, keyboard, mouse, and

an SSD all connected to your laptop at

the same time. And if you were on the

MacBook Air, this wouldn't really work

without a separate dock. But yeah, on

the M5 MacBooks, you get two Thunderbolt

4 ports, an HDMI slot, and an SD card

slot. Oh, and of course, you get the

charging port. Don't forget that one. So

yeah, to me personally, the port support

on the MacBook Pros is [music] plenty

enough. One thing that's always annoyed

me with MacBooks is that whenever I'm

working on go, I have my SSD just

randomly hanging around the desk. And

especially if I'm working at a coffee

shop or a plane, it gets really

annoying, which kind of ruins the point

of having the 14-in model because the

whole reason I even went with the

smaller model in the first place was so

that I could work on go easily. So, when

DeltaHub sent me their Hold X magnetic

mount, I was genuinely hyped because

with the Hold X, I can stick my SSD to

the back of my MacBook and don't have to

worry about the SSD dropping off the

table or something while I'm working.

It's really easy to set up. Just peel

the protective layer and press for a

minute, and it's set. And now, whenever

I start working, I can just attach my

SSD to the back of my laptop. Another

essential setup upgrade they sent over

is their Carpio wrist rest. One of my

coworkers has had a long career in tech,

and he actually had a pretty major wrist

injury due to having poor wrist

positioning, which is definitely

something I want to avoid. With the

wrist rest, your wrist is elevated about

a centimeter or [music] 0.4 inches to

reduce the wrist extension while using

your mouse or keyboard. And what makes

this stand out from other similar

products is that, unlike other products,

it doesn't apply pressure to the carpal

part of your wrist, which reduces blood

flow to your hand. One side note, make

sure you place it under your palm and

not directly under your wrist. Also, it

doesn't reduce the wrist motion and

actually slides on your desk/mousepad

[music]

with your hand. So, if you want to

improve the ergonomics of your setup and

keep your SSD safe while working on the

go, then highly recommend you check out

the Hold X magnetic mount as well as the

Carpio wrist rest from DeltaHub. Both of

these products are designed by them and

patented globally. I'll leave the first

link in the description where you can

pick them up for 15% off. Use the code

Luke Made It. And a big thank you to

DeltaHub for supporting channel and

sponsoring the video. Then, what

everybody wants to hear about is the

performance, so let's talk about the

performance next. I want to keep the

tests as consistent as possible on the

channel so that we can actually see some

progression generation over generation.

Now, on a normal day, I usually have my

browser open and IDE and have a couple

of containers running if I'm running

stuff against my local backend. With

that said, I wanted to see how fast the

base M5 chip can spin up a hundred

different containers. And while yes,

this is a bit of a silly test, this

still gives a decent idea of the disk IO

on the laptop. And here, the base M5

chip got the containers up and running

in 12.8 seconds. The M1 Pro and the M4

Air came in around 14 seconds, while the

M4 Max just smokes everyone and came in

only 6 seconds. So, you could say the M5

chip falls somewhere around the M4 Pro

chip in terms of performance. For

multi-core performance, I wanted to run

the build on the Kubernetes repo, and

the base M5 chip managed to run the

build in 2 minutes and 12 seconds.

Whereas for the M4 Max, it took less

than a minute, coming in at 57 seconds.

But I mean, this is expected as the Max

chips are literally built for multi-core

performance, so this doesn't mean the M5

chip is bad. It just means the M4 Max is

that much better when it comes to

multi-core performance. This year, the

base M5 MacBook Pro also got a memory

bandwidth bump to 153 gigs per second.

Basically, with MacBooks, Apple uses

unified memory, meaning the CPU, GPU,

and neural engine share the memory pool,

and a higher memory bandwidth is going

to help with things like video editing

or local LLM performance and things of

this nature. Also, now Apple has gone

ahead and introduced AI hardware inside

of the GPU cores. So, previously, we had

the neural engine that was handling all

of the machine learning tasks, but now

the whole chip is actually involved in

that process. But anyways, I have my

variations of quicksort here. One is

single core, and the other one is

multi-core. Basically, the single core

task is just going to run quicksort on

the whole sample array, whereas the

multi-core one is going to split the

sample array into multiple chunks, sort

those chunks, and then merge everything

together. It kind of sounds like merge

sorting, but it's different. For the

single core performance, it was pretty

cool to see the M5 chip coming in right

around 91 seconds, which was really

close to the base M4 chip and the M4

Max, both coming in at around 100

seconds. And of course, for the M1 Pro

chip, the single core took almost double

at 192 seconds. So, we can see around 9

to 10% gains generation over generation

here. As for the multi-core performance,

the base M5 chip came in at 22 seconds,

the base M4 chip came in at 25 seconds,

and the M1 Pro chip at 32 seconds. Of

course, again, for this multi-core test,

the M4 Max absolutely smoked this

benchmark [music] and finished the

multi-core sort in only 14 seconds.

Still, like I said, the base M5 chip is

almost at that M4 Pro chip level. So, if

you're running tests in parallel, a

linter or a big repo or something, then

the base M5 chip is definitely going to

provide some good power for you. Then,

of course, we have to try out the LLM

performance as well. Here, we're mainly

looking at the tokens per second, which

basically tells how fast the model is

outputting text. Though, I don't think

this is the greatest benchmark since

anything over, let's say, 40 tokens per

second is faster than the speed at which

any human can even read. So, the tokens

per second doesn't really matter if it's

over 40. Nevertheless, I think local

LLMs will become more and more useful as

the models get better over time and run

on smaller hardware. To keep the test

consistent though, I used the DeepSeek

R1 7 billion parameter model. And with

this setup, the base M5 MacBook Pro was

pulling around 25 tokens per second, the

base M4 chip was pulling anywhere

between 18 to 20 tokens per second, and

the M4 Max delivered around 70 tokens

per second. Of course, for those

high-end models, the RAM on your laptop

is going to be a bottleneck no matter

how much RAM you go for in your laptop,

and we're just not there yet where we

would be able to run the best models

locally on our laptops. Now, when it

comes to RAM and how much you should go

for, again, this really depends. If you

edit heavy footage like S-Log 3 and add

tons of effects to your timeline, or you

just want to be running local LLMs on

your laptop, then yeah, the base 16 gigs

won't be enough for you. My thing is

though that for most people, 16 gigs of

RAM is still enough. I mean, my work

laptop, which I use for my 9-to-5

programming job, has 16 gigs of RAM. The

downside here is that we seem to be

moving towards a world where, instead of

optimizing software, we seem to be

telling customers to add more RAM to

their laptops. So, in a few years, I'm

not sure if 16 gigs is going to be

enough anymore. So, if you want to

future-proof your laptop for the next 5

to 6 years, then go for 24 gigs of RAM

at least. And sticking with the topic of

memory and storage, the 1 TB has

obviously been plenty for me, and I

think it's a little bit overkill. This,

of course, depends on what you need

installed on your laptop, but I have all

of my must-have apps, and I've only used

130 gigs. For media, etc., I have my NAS

and SSDs, so I don't need that much

storage. And I'd argue this same goes

for most people. In my opinion, unless

you know that you'll need a lot of

storage, just go with the 512 gig

option. And trust me, if you're somebody

who needs more storage, you will know.

Also, one good way to check this is to

just see how much storage you've

currently used on your current laptop

and make your storage decision based on

that. is also an interesting topic. Of

course, MacBooks are known for having

incredible battery lives, and this one

is no exception. Thing that most people

wonder about is whether they should go

for the 16-in model since it has a

slightly bigger battery. And while yes,

the battery is larger, so is the screen

that the battery needs to power. So,

that kind of compensates for the

difference, and I personally wouldn't

make any decisions purely on that. But

let's say I'm editing a video and I keep

my brightness at the max [music]

brightness, then I can expect to get

around 4 to 5 hours of screen time. For

programming, I can quite easily get

through the whole day with the screen on

full brightness. And yes, I know I'm

weird, but I like to keep my display at

max brightness almost at all times. I

should probably go and get my eyes

checked. All in all, the M5 MacBook Pro

is a really good machine, and for the

first time, maybe ever, we can say that

MacBooks are genuinely decent values

spec-wise as the RAM prices have gone

crazy. But with possibly the biggest

MacBook launch right around the corner

with the M6 lineup, I would personally

try and wait and see what happens there

unless you need a laptop ASAP. Most of

time, the FOMO is minimal when it comes

to MacBooks because as you can see with

the M5 lineup, it's usually just minor

improvements over last year. If the

leaks are true, you might be feeling

some type of way at the end of the year

if you get a laptop right [music] now

and don't just wait till the end of the

year. But yeah, these were my thoughts

on the M5 MacBook Pro and whether or not

you should be upgrading your laptop

right now or wait till the end of the

year. With that said, thank you so much

for watching all the way to the end, and

I'll see you in the next one.

Peace.