Apple MacBook Pro 16 2026 Review - M5 Pro makes one of the best multimedia laptops even better

[Redaktion]

The MacBook Pro 16 with the M5 Pro gets a big bump both in terms of CPU as well as GPU performance. Apple also includes faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs as well as Wi-Fi 7, so the overall package is even better than before.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2026-Review-M5-Pro-makes-one-of-the-best-multimedia-laptops-even-better.1245523.0.html

[M2026]

52dB...well...

[Yeshy]

Thanks for putting no SDExpress as a con, though I wonder if the lack of UHS2 compatibility has something to do with that

[Man]

Where are PWM figures?

[FPS per price]

Where is the display section? It has an ok iGPU, but how fast are the pixel response times?
And microscope picture of how clear the pixels are?
GPU
I guess nevermind, as the FPS per price is crazy bad and yes, this is not a gaming laptop in the first place:
Cyberpunk 2077
Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 RTX 5070 Laptop: 98.3 (80min) fps (70.0% faster)
Apple MacBook Pro 16 2026 M5 Pro (20-Core GPU): 57.8 fps
-> 3dmark.com/search:
5070 (notebook): Average score: 3277
4050 (notebook): Average score: 1951
1.68 = 3277/1951
So, based on this, the Pro 16 2026 M5 Pro has the equivalent of a 4050 Laptop GPU, but costs 5300.

Battery

The result is still excellent though and clearly superior to most Windows alternatives, only Samsung's Galaxy Book6 Ultra can keep up despite the much smaller battery.

Looks like some Windows laptops have caught up with APPLE.

At full display brightness, the result is once again lower than before at 6.6 vs 7.3 hours, while the Galaxy Book6 Ultra is clearly ahead at 8.4 hours (but at a lower brightness of 500 vs. ~630 nits on the MBP 16).

So it's equal. Not even this can APPLE win.

18h 32min

If you don't want to spend 5300 to show off the battery life, should this even be a thing, know this: The mental concentration and performance drops after 8 hours noticeably (and more so exponentially with added hours) and the amount of total mistakes made after this time doesn't justify keeping continuing much, if at all, after that, because the made mistakes will have to be fixed later on, which will consume more time yet again and offset any additional hours invested. I guess there are people who needs the 2 work days of battery life, because they don't have access to electricity, but can also afford, wait, no, those people would use a 500-1000 bucks (also 16 inch) laptop and attach a "car battery" (not necessarily literally, but you get the point) to it.

Note, overall worse metrics in battery life and noise compared to the predecessor.

[slws]

Sustained power draw 81W + 2600 RPM + 33 dB is not possible. It should be 3600 RPM and about 40 dB I guess? Please correct me.

[Temperatures?]

Sustained power draw 81W + 2600 RPM + 33 dB is not possible. It should be 3600 RPM and about 40 dB I guess? Please correct me.

I agree. You cannot cool 80+ watts with only 33 dB fan noise. That would go against the laws of physics. Something isn't adding up here.

What were the temperatures like? 105 degrees Celsius?

Please look into this / retest further.

I guess nevermind, as the FPS per price is crazy bad
...
So, based on this, the Pro 16 2026 M5 Pro has the equivalent of a 4050 Laptop GPU, but costs 5300.
...
Looks like some Windows laptops have caught up with APPLE.
...
So it's equal. Not even this can APPLE win.

Or equivalent to a 8050s. The M5 Max has bad FPS per $, yes. But that is aimed at AI / LLM crowd so it kinda doesn't matter. Where I am at the M5 Pro comparably priced to the recently released onexfly apex halo handheld altho that seems to only be available in 395 w/ 8060s + 48 GB ram config for now, and apple would charge more for similar amount of ram.

And no, I disagree with your comments on battery. First of all you cannot compare miniLED @ max brightness run times to that oled laptop.

MiniLED takes a lot more power at max brightness. It's not even close. There's a reason why Asus years ago switched from miniLED to oled. It's also likely the reason apple is planning to switch to oled with M6 MBP's.

Another explanation (or excuse if you'd like to call it) why that Samsung is showing is showing that better efficiency is because it throttles. Both that cpu and GPU. Apple isn't throttling at all. If someone tested this tweaking the power settings to the chip (not sure if possible or how to, as I'm not a Mac user, maybe someone else can chime in here), you would see much better efficiency and battery runtimes.

What you're seeing here is just out of the box unthrottled results vs a throttling oled windows laptop.

I'd also like to add, this igpu frankly embarrasses Intel's panther lake arc b390 igpu. It's better in every single way. Shame it doesn't run windows or Linux.. :( so I've zero interest in buying one.

[slws]

Sustained power draw 81W + 2600 RPM + 33 dB is not possible. It should be 3600 RPM and about 40 dB I guess? Please correct me.

It is actually possible under several minutes. Thereafter only 2 things can happen:
 - fans are ramping up to 3600-3800 RPM, which is still relatively quiet, compared to the competition
or
 - power draw is going down to 60 W