Apple·laptop
MacBook Pro 14 M5
Based on 24 credible posts from Hacker News & Bluesky. 10 filtered out as bot-like or off-topic.
Low confidenceFew owner reviews so far, so this score can still move a lot. How we score
Scored September 27, 2026
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Owner reviews
Overall owner mood
Owners are split: 21% of 24 reviews are positive, 25% negative, and the rest mixed or neutral. Praise centers on display. The most common complaint is performance (4 owners).
What owners like
Display praised by 3 owners
“These systems are there to give you the extra I/O and better quality screen/other additional "pro" features that you get with the Pro lineup but for someone who is only doing medium-intensity tasks.”
What owners complain about
Performance raised by 4 owners
“And Bluetooth 5.3, Their Pro Mac are slower than their iPhone Pro.”
Price & value raised by 3 owners
“Macs still win out on certain CPU benchmarks and certainly on creative benchmarks like video editing, but the truth of the matter is unless you’re making money editing videos, that doesn’t matter.”
Build & durability raised by 2 owners
“The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.”
Controls & input raised by 2 owners
“macOS has made itself require it by designing around it unnecessarily, presumably to sell more $150 external trackpads (e.g., a three finger swipe is really not easier to accomplish than a keyboard shortcut, it’s just overengineering).”
What owners talk about
- Performance2 praise · 4 complain
- Display3 praise · 1 complain
- Price & value0 praise · 3 complain
- Build & durability0 praise · 2 complain
- Controls & input0 praise · 2 complain
- Sound0 praise · 2 complain
- Battery & charging1 praise · 1 complain
- Connectivity1 praise · 1 complain
Built from the reviews themselves — every quote links to the owner who wrote it.
Full text of every credible post we scored. Bot-like and off-topic comments are hidden.
[...] In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. [...] I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. [...]
I have played with both mlx-lm and llama.cpp after I bought a 24GB M5 MacBook Pro last year. [...]
I'm on a 48 GB M5 Macbook Pro. I use 4-bit quants with a context window of 16-32k. I tried Qwen 3.6 27B, but I can only get around 10 tokens per second, but it's painfully slow, and it often fails during writefile tool calls, even with Qwen Code.
Isn't this just because they will be refreshed soon, rumours are around June. I'd imagine Apple stops making the old hardware a few months before a refresh and then just sells the old stock. [...] Last week I got my (customised) M5 MacBook Pro that was ordered during launch week, not really any longer than expected when ordering a new model.
I spent the better part of the weekend trying to figure out why text was blurry on when using external displays on our new M5 Macbook Pros. Turns out unless you run macOS at a very low UI scale (making everyting look huge on a 4k display) it will refuse to render in high DPI mode - making text look dreadfully blurry. [...]
[...] The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds worse than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.
I have an M5 MacBook Pro. I’ll presume I’ll be able to run Asahi on it once I’m ready to switch. It’s not their fault per se, but it’s discouraging.
I have a 24GB M5 macbook pro. In ComfyUI using default z-image workflow, generating a single image just took me 399 seconds, during which the computer froze and my airpods lost audio. On replicate.com a single image takes 1.5s at a price of 1000 images per $1. [...]
[...] The first thing I did was going to the Apple Store to buy a latest M5 MacBook Pro with the highest 24G memory and get MLX running. [...]
No WiFi 7 and WiFi 6E only is annoying. Especially for what they are charging. And Bluetooth 5.3, Their Pro Mac are slower than their iPhone Pro. [...] I guess they say this only for M5 MacBook Pro, because the previous M4 has always had slower SSD speed than M4 Pro at 3.5GB/s. [...] I assume no update on SDXC UHS-III.
glad i got the macbook pro 14 m5, 24gb. [...] maybe by then prices will come back down? [...]
[...] My M5 MacBook Pro, while amazing, is basically relegated to being a thin client with amazing battery life that exclusively SSH's into my desktop PC for work. I could spawn a Linux VM / use Docker/Podman locally, but dealing with allocating memory, hard drive space and whatever other limitations non-native containerisation incurs isn't worth the squeeze. [...]
I have an M5 MacBook Pro and I also have a separate GPU setup for running models. [...]
[...] I have a brand new M5 MacBook Pro - top end with all the specs and I've tried local models and they're barely functional.
[...] Apple hasn’t raised RAM upgrade prices [1] (although to be fair their RAM upgrades were hugely inflated before the crunch) and their high memory bandwidth means they do inference faster than most consumer GPUs. [...] I’m thinking about upgrading to an M5 MacBook Pro with much more RAM, but I think the capabilities of cloud-hosted models will always run ahead of local models and it might never be that useful to do local inference. [...] to work on different problems in parallel) but locally you only have a fixed amount of memory bandwidth so running multiple model instances in parallel is slower. [...]
[...] The M5 MacBook Pro is basically the same as a MacBook Air but with a fan to get that extra 10% performance boost, and better screen and I/O. [...] I think that the M5 base chip could easily operate in a much thinner/lighter chassis without the throttling of the fanless Air design while maintaining quiet performance. Also, the edge of the MacBook Pro is sharp and uncomfortable compared to other laptops when you are resting palms/arms on the laptop directly.
[...] When you by a MacBook Pro 14" M5, you buy an integrated graphics-class system and essentially you're getting a laptop that's the exact same size as a laptop you can get packed with a 100 watt RTX 5070Ti. [...] Obviously I don't mean to say that Apple should make a laptop that sacrifices fan noise to that degree, but the same idea is happening in their lineup: You buy a M5 MacBook Pro, you're getting a laptop thick and heavy enough to thermally support a much higher tier system that isn't even on the same planet in terms of performance (an M5 Pro or Max system). [...] These systems are there to give you the extra I/O and better quality screen/other additional "pro" features that you get with the Pro lineup but for someone who is only doing medium-intensity tasks. [...] Do a lot of the same cost-cutting as the MacBook Neo: no haptic trackpad (gamers don't need it),
I just bought a M5 Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago. Thinking of returning it and getting a M5 Pro with the same configuration but only $200 more. How should I compare M5 vs M5 Pro?
[...] For example, the ASUS TUF A14 is only one hour shorter on the real world office productivity test than the M5 MacBook Pro: (Battery life section) It also lasts longer than the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14”. Bonus points: it has replaceable, upgradable, DUAL full size SSD slots and replaceable WiFi card. You’re also getting a better discrete graphics chip that you can use for higher performance applications, or go on still-good integrated graphics to get that great battery life. Intel Panther Lake systems are rolling out and they have graphics performance slightly exceeding the M5 MacBook Pro along with excellent power efficiency. Macs still win out on certain CPU benchmarks and certainly on creative benchmarks like video editing, but the truth of the matter is unless you’re making money editing videos, that doesn’t matter. It’s not like Apple chips are so far ahead that buying something else will make you sit in purgatory waiting for builds to complete. [...] There are even PC laptops with haptic trackpads, but also, you really don’t need that. macOS has made itself require it by designing around it unnecessarily, presumably to sell more $150 external trackpads (e.g., a three finger swipe is really not easier to accomplish than a keyboard shortcut, it’s just overengineering). Even if you can’t get the same battery life…that’s something a $50 external battery can solve, and I would suggest that anything above 8 hours of battery is more of a nice to have than a necessity. [...]
The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). [...]
The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). [...] Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. [...] Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. [...]
I can't speak for the person you've asked, but, I have an M5 Macbook Pro and Asahi Linux only recently got support for M3 Macs, and that support is marked WIP on most features: I assume it'll be a couple of years before Asahi is an option for my machine.
From a quick search online, the max brightness of your laptop is 400 nits SDR and 500 HDR. My M5 MacBook Pro is 1000 and 1500 nits. Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness. [...] But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects. [...] I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. [...]
I was overly sleepy due to prescribed sleeping pills when I woke up at 6am to preorder my M5 MacBook Pro. [...]
The claims, and the evidence
What the brand claims
No published claims on file for this product yet.
What owners report
“[...] In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. [...] I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. [...]”
after 6 monthsView on Hacker News“I have played with both mlx-lm and llama.cpp after I bought a 24GB M5 MacBook Pro last year. [...]”
after 1 yearView on Hacker News“I'm on a 48 GB M5 Macbook Pro. I use 4-bit quants with a context window of 16-32k. I tried Qwen 3.6 27B, but I can only get around 10 tokens per second, but it's painfully slow, and it often fails during writefile tool calls, even with Qwen Code.”
“I spent the better part of the weekend trying to figure out why text was blurry on when using external displays on our new M5 Macbook Pros. Turns out unless you run macOS at a very low UI scale (making everyting look huge on a 4k display) it will refuse to render in high DPI mode - making text look dreadfully blurry. [...]”
Common MacBook Pro 14 M5 problems
Issues at least two owners independently report.
- Price & value3 mentionsView on Hacker News
“From a quick search online, the max brightness of your laptop is 400 nits SDR and 500 HDR. My M5 MacBook Pro is 1000 and 1500 nits. Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness. [...] But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects. [...] I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. [...]”
- Performance4 mentionsView on Hacker News
“I'm on a 48 GB M5 Macbook Pro. I use 4-bit quants with a context window of 16-32k. I tried Qwen 3.6 27B, but I can only get around 10 tokens per second, but it's painfully slow, and it often fails during writefile tool calls, even with Qwen Code.”
- Build & durability2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“[...] The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds worse than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.”
- Controls & input2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“[...] The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds worse than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.”
- Sound2 mentionsView on Hacker News
“[...] The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds worse than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.”