M5 vs M4 Pro MacBook Pro Confirming I'm No Power User After-all.

the M5 MacBook Pro versus the M4 Pro MacBook Pro. [sighs] I used to think of myself as a power user. I make videos. I do Photoshop and AutoCAD. I am the technical director of an event production company. It's all computer. And so, anytime I've upgraded my Mac, I have always gotten the higherend, if not the flagship model of a given year. This is my M4 Max that I apparently don't need for any reason. This video is about the new M5, which is the base model, versus the M4 Pro. And it was birthed from the comment section where it has become clear to me that the choice that people are most often making when buying a new Mac computer now is between the new M5 MacBook Pro and the M4 Pro MacBook Pro. Faster CPUs and GPUs, more CPUs and GPUs. My first point is though that with the M5, the base model, the only one that's out at the time of this video, it can do all of that. It can run Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, all without the fans even coming on. The Max is now like a niche product that almost no one needs. This new M5 proves to me for two years in a row now that I am no power user after all. Looking at the specs, it may look like the M4 Pro should only be barely more powerful, if at all, than the M5. 12 core CPU compared to a 10 core CPU. And the M5 CPU cores are about 20% faster than the M4s. But Apple CPUs are made up of a mix of performance and efficiency cores. And it's the performance cores that actually do all the stuff that you recognize as being fast, while the efficiency cores handle the hundreds of background tasks that are going on constantly. And if you look a little closer, even the wimpiest version of the M4 Pro has double the number of performance cores from the M5. So, it's not just 10 cores versus 12 cores when we're talking about the performance that you can actually notice. M5's 10 core CPU only has four performance cores, and the other six are efficiency cores. M4 Pro has eight performance cores and only four efficiency cores. So sure, the M5 ones are 20% faster, but the M4 Pro has 100% more of them working together. And this is the same story for the base model M4 MacBook Pro 2. And interestingly, because of the extra efficiency cores that that computer and the M5 base model have, they do a few little things just a little bit faster than their beefier counterparts, like indexing through your photo library and categorizing things in the background for metadata. And really, technically, all of these background tasks will have more cores being thrown at them. So, the base model Max can actually chew through that work a little faster. But most of this work is essentially so lightweight that it's pretty much instantaneous. Anyway, the initial startup and loading of the OS is slightly faster on the base models than it is on the Pro and the Max models because it's those efficiency cores that are handling all the startup processes. Let's take a look at a Final Cut Pro project. And I read the comments. I know not everyone's a video editor and some of you are tired of this being the example reviewers always use, but I'd like to explain. This is something that we spend so much time on that we can very clearly see the discrepancies between the chips and the results translate over to general computing. Also, since I've got this particular project set up in a way that it is going to use the CPU and the GPU during the render, even though the media engine is doing a lot of the work here, but anyway, Final Cut Pro. So, I've got a project set up on both computers here. It's not too terribly complex, but it's a good standin for an above average difficulty edit of a typical high production value YouTube channel. And actually, I just upgraded to an 8K camera. This picture you're seeing here was shot in 8K. But I don't know how well these handle that yet because I'm literally sitting here right now shooting my very first 8K shot ever. I'm going to need so many hard drives. The test I'm about to show was done with my very old and now suddenly outdated 4K setup. I guess you should subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss my next video. probably titled something like shot in 8K edited on M5 to see if this thing can handle that madness. But for this review, this project had two cameras, both shooting in 4K, H.265, Sony's XAVC HS codec. And to make sure it would push these computers a little harder, I normally actually bake my colors right into the shot so I don't have to do color correction cuz I'm in a really controlled environment. But this is a little more representative of what I see people doing for their YouTube channels. I added some grain. I added multiple layers of color correction using some color wheels and some color curves. There are plenty of B-roll shots that run on top of the two 4K streams. So, now we're pushing three 4K streams and plenty of animated titles that have dozens of their own layers of special effects. I use or maybe overuse this effect that you're seeing right now where I'm sort of cut out of the background and plopped on a new layer on top of the same thing so that words can appear behind me which means that there is a fully animated rotoscope of my body in this shot. Also, a lot of these elements require the GPU and the CPU to do work. Fun fact, even with 4K editing on a Mac, if your editing consists of just chopping up footage, no effects, no color correction, the CPU and GPU will basically be idle throughout the process, including the export. Hence my example of using a bunch of layered things to make sure these computers actually have to do work. And before doing this, I would have put a pretty big bet on the M4 Pro of doing a better job at this, even knowing that my M5 is perfectly suitable for editing my own videos. Just having all the additional GPUs alone I thought would make this render faster, but I'll be damned. The M5 MacBook Pro beats the M4 Pro MacBook Pro with its many extra CPU and GPU cores, and you can see those are being used pretty heavily during the render. I screen recorded the export with MX Power Gadget running so you can see the stats. I have background rendering turned off in Final Cut Pro, so everything the computers are doing to render the video has to happen in real time. And it's clear that the GPUs are getting hammered during the export. between 70 and up to 95% GPU usage on the M5 and then 70 to 80% GPU usage on the M4 Pro, exporting a 13minute long 4K multicam project in Final Cut Pro. The M5 pulls slightly ahead and finishes the export about 30 seconds faster. M5 exports that video in 10 minutes and 30 seconds. The M4 Pro exports that same video in 11 minutes and 3 seconds. Exact same project and we're exporting to 4K H.264 with the multiass turned on. And a couple of things. The M4 Pro has 24 gigs of RAM where the M5 only has 16 gigs of RAM. Ooh, it's like a fire started back there. I mixed up my smoke machine juice a little too thick. It takes a really long time to get through all of it. So, I'm just The last 10 videos or so, this smoke has been too thick. During the export, the M4 Pro does eek above 16 gigs of RAM usage, but for a large majority of the export, it's under that. The M5 stays right around 13 gigs of RAM usage, but it did tap that swap a couple times during the export, which actually makes it an even bigger surprise that it did it faster than the M4 Pro. Something tells me if you had more RAM on the M5, it would be even faster still. Quick tangent, and this really should be a temporary problem. If you're watching this later than December of 2025, I hope it's already fixed, but ever since the update to Mac OS 26 and then later 26.1, and I'm even using the beta 26.2, Final Cut Pro is just using lots of RAM. like a problematic amount of RAM during the editing process. Something's not normal. The way I make and edit videos hasn't changed at all until this one I'm shooting now in 8K, I'm sure that's going to be even worse. But for this project that I did the tests on, and the last five projects since OS 26 has come out, haven't changed anything. There's this process called VT decoder that is just leaking RAM. It's a little out of control. It'll just run up and use up all of your RAM. Even on my M4 Max, which has 36 GB of RAM, it'll use it all up and go into swap. And that's just on the first like cut up of the footage. This is before the effects. But if you quit and reopen Final Cut, it just goes back down to normal and starts to slowly build up again. Anybody who bought their first computer as an M5 MacBook Pro has never seen anything other than this problem. And so probably thinks that video editing uses a ton of RAM when at least it didn't used to. I hope this isn't the new normal. So that's a bummer. And it makes all of this really hard to test accurately, I think. But again, I assume that's a bug that's just going to go away. Anyway, M4 Pro is not faster at exporting highdefinition video than the new M5. M5 does beat it every time, but only by a few seconds. So, I would consider these two computers about the same when it comes to editing video. But I would urge you to get a RAM upgrade, especially if you're working with 4K video. And especially if you're working with multicam 4K video, and especially if you want to move into 8K video, just because you're greedy and you want to be able to punch in really close on your own face to show off probably your nose hairs or whatever food you eating most recently. I brought expert historian Dr. Timy Tetweiler to the studio to explain the physical differences between these two laptops. >> What? They're exactly the same here. >> Well, thank you. Something I find interesting is yes, the M4 Pro has more raw processing power. Literally twice the number of performance CPU cores, but while this thing's going at 100%, it's pulling about 40 watts. The M5 MacBook Pro going full out is only pulling about 30 watts. Both of these laptops have the same around 70Wh battery. And sure, you'll get slightly higher FPS on the M4 Pro than you will on the M5 base model if you're playing Cyberpunk 2077 in the backseat of somebody's car. But that also means you're going to be able to yank about 30% more power out of the battery to do that. And I recognize that my own life isn't necessarily a prime example of all computer purchasers, but I'm on planes and trains kind of a lot. Assassin's Creed Shadows will run a full hour longer on the M5 base model simply because its graphics capabilities are lower. That might be a weird way to look at it, but there it is. And it's not just games, but since the M5 has less power, it'll last longer the harder you push both of these on batteries. We're living in this sort of interesting time where the speed of these things caught up to what people use computers for. So basically, for almost everyone who's asking which computer they should buy, yeah, it depends on what you're doing with it. Some apps really do benefit a lot from a ton of GPU cores, but I don't know, something like 95% of us have literally no use for anything more powerful than the base model M5 MacBook Pro. And that goes for my wife and she's the COO of a company. Another way to compare these, like I said, the M4 Pro has double the number of performance cores up to double the number of GPU cores. So, if a program is written to take advantage of that, something like Lightroom exports, you get about 1.6x the total compute speed when choosing the M4 Pro over the M5. And that's factoring in the something like 20% bump in CPU speed performance core. But, and this is a big butt, most of the programs you use, or I should say most of the programs I use in a given day, don't use all 12 cores when doing the thing they do. All the office apps and the mail programs and Chrome and Safari, Teams and Messengers, they all use two to four cores. And a lot of programs still just use a single core. And in all of those cases, the M5 is actually slightly faster than the M4. So, if you just put these side by side and you didn't know which one was which because they look exactly the same, if you're blowing through Outlook emails, the M5 is going to feel a teeny tiny bit faster than the M4. But because the M4 cores are already so [ __ ] fast anyway, it's super hard to notice that 20% bump. Like all regular officeworky productivity apps do everything essentially instantly on both of these. That's unless you have slow internet. Macs are so interconnected with iCloud and other services that when you have bad internet, it feels like you have a super slow computer. But really, they just have to wait for confirmation. A lot of the times, things like Photoshop, Lightroom, and AutoCAD are constantly checking these little licensing programs to make sure they're not pirated or whatever. They all run on these licenses now that need permission to run even locally on your computer. Whatever. I feel like I'm rambling now. So, all of this boils down to get M4 Pro if you're running Blender. Really, if you're doing anything in 3D, like 3D CAD or building sized models in SketchUp, or if you're a music producer and you're doing that thing where you somehow have 175 tracks all running in Logic Pro and everything has an effect on it, that's super multi-threaded, so more CPUs will do more good. M4 Pro wins at all things LLM except for image generation somehow. Code compiling is slightly faster with more cores or if you're using your computer to run Docker or other virtual machines where you can assign some of the CPU cores straight out to Parallels or whatever if you're running Windows and games. Always games. Right now, Crossover can run a bunch of games pretty well. And the M4 Pro has a better GPU. Not a faster GPU, but more GPU. And GPUs scale better with more cores than CPUs do. And really, this choice is a win-win. You can't lose. These two computers are so much more computer than almost anyone needs already. In fact, your choice really should be how much extra RAM am I going to pay for when I get this new computer. The new OS is really RAM heavy, and RAM is typically the best futurep proofing measure you can take when buying a new computer anyway. I used to say 16 gigs was probably enough, but I'm going to start saying that everyone should be getting 24 gigs of RAM or 32 if this new Final Cut Pro RAM thing is just the way it is now. Man, I remember my first parallel CPU. It was the Power Mac G4 and I bought that computer in the previous century, 1999. The very idea that I could have two CPUs running in tandem was just wild. And that thing felt so fast. 128 megabytes of RAM. Oh, see [ __ ] wrapped. >> Not even one for one more for safety. >> I don't know. >> [laughter]

How does the M5 compare to the M4 Pro MacBook Pro? In this video I run through a bunch of real world examples of using these two computers to see how they stack up. It seems like this is the choice a large number of new MacBook Pro buyers are trying to decide between. M4 Pro Macbook Pro: https://amzn.to/3KRbTsC M5 Macbook Pro: https://amzn.to/48UFvx8 The 8k Camera! https://amzn.to/4q3pzQ8 You can support the channel simply by doing your normal Amazon Shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/48Te2vY Heres a list of that stuff I use to make videos in case you want to buy it because you like how it looks! The Lens: https://amzn.to/3XMLMWY My 'normal' camera: https://amzn.to/4kOvRBm The slider that moves the camera back and fourth: https://amzn.to/3FrtwMx The other camera: https://amzn.to/4kR5Lxy My main light: https://amzn.to/3FtSP0p My haze machine: https://amzn.to/3FpKX07 My New Keyboard (It didnt appear but I really love it): https://amzn.to/3Xq8CTy