Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, armed with the blazing-fast M5 Max chip, isn’t just another incremental bump, it’s a genuine performance rocket that leaves the M4 generation in the dust, especially when it comes to noticeably zippy SSD read/write speeds.
Cameron Faulkner, Nathan Edwards, and Antonio G. Di Benedetto for The Verge:
Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver “up to 2x” the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 laptops. Our testing bore that out: the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed. That’s 86 percent faster reads and 123 percent faster writes than the 4TB drive on our M4 Max review unit. [We] saw similar results in the 2026 MacBook Air with the M5, as well as the M5-equipped MacBook Pro that we reviewed in late 2025 compared to its predecessor…
Compared to the 12 CPU core / 38 GPU core M2 Max from 2023, single CPU core performance in Geekbench 6 for the M5 Max is 55 percent faster, while multi-core performance nearly doubled. Metal rendering performance in a GPU test showed a 64 percent improvement in the M5 Max versus the M2 Max. And the M5 Max cut Premiere Pro 4K export time of our five-minute, 33-second video by a full 30 percent — doubtless also helped by faster write speeds.
The performance gains of the M5 Max are substantial enough to make a night-and-day difference if you’re used to a laptop with the M2 Max chip [or earlier].
MacDailyNews Take: Without even factoring in the CPU* and GPU** performance gains, those 86% faster reads and 123% faster writes alone will make it well worth the upgrade for professional users.
*The M5 Max is about 10 percent faster in Geekbench CPU multicore and 14 percent faster in Cinebench 2026.
**The GPU cores in the M5 Max deliver a 26 percent improvement with the OpenCL framework, an 18 percent improvement with Metal graphics rendering, and shaved eight seconds from The Verge‘s test 4K Premiere Pro export test vs. the M4 Max, about a 10 percent improvement.
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