Apple MacBook Pro (M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro with M5 Max puts Apple’s most powerful laptop chip into the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. It is built for professionals who can’t be tethered to a desk: colourists grading on location, ML engineers fine-tuning models on a flight and VFX artists reviewing renders client-side, all of whom need workstation-class power that lasts a full day unplugged.

Who it's for

• AI engineers who need up to 128GB of unified memory to load large models locally and run inference and fine-tune smaller models
• Video editors cutting multiple streams of 8K ProRes footage with GPU-accelerated colour grading
• VFX artists building complex Motion or Cinema 4D scenes without proxies
• Location shooters and frequent flyers who need render and export performance away from a charger

Key features

• 18-core CPU: 6 new “super core” high-performance cores plus 12 power-efficient performance cores, Apple’s fastest laptop CPU architecture to date.
• Up to 40-core GPU: the largest GPU ever fitted to a MacBook, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing for real-time 3D previews and colour work.
• Up to 128GB unified memory: enough to run large local AI models and handle huge multi-layer creative files without swapping to disk.
• Up to 614GB/s memory bandwidth: with the 40-core GPU configuration, keeping CPU, GPU and Neural Engine fed under sustained load.
• Liquid Retina XDR display: up to 1600 nits peak HDR brightness and ProMotion adaptive refresh up to 120Hz, in either 14.2-inch or 16.2-inch sizes.
• Up to 22-hour battery life: on the 16-inch model, video playback, with fast-charging support.
• Ports: three Thunderbolt 5 ports, MagSafe 3, HDMI, an SD card slot and a headphone jack, so most professional workflows need no dongle.
• Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6: the fastest current wireless standards.

Specifications

Good to know

• M5 Max is the top of the MacBook Pro range, and its GPU and memory ceiling come at a real price premium over the M5 Pro model.
• If your day-to-day work is software development, general design or office productivity, you are unlikely to notice the difference and the Pro chip will save you money.
• The thermal design in the 16-inch chassis is built for sustained loads rather than short bursts, so render and export performance holds up over a long session.
• The 1600-nit peak brightness and wide colour gamut mean client reviews and colour-critical work don’t need a separate monitor.

Choose M5 Max when you genuinely need the 128GB memory ceiling or the 40-core GPU. For everything else, the M5 Pro model is the cheaper fit.