This MacBook Pro Makes Me Feel Stupid

This is the laptop that always makes me

feel kind of stupid because normally

since I have this YouTube channel, I

have the Max version. This the M4 Max

and now I have the M5 Max which is

supposed to be the ridiculous one. And

then I go back and test the Pro chip,

open the same apps, do the same work,

push it through the same nonsense and I

start having some very uncomfortable

thoughts. So I decided to test

everything, not just the synthetic

benchmarks, real builds, real SSD

transfers, real AI models side by side.

And what I found is that some of these

results are embarrassingly close. Oh,

what? Between these two, not that one.

And some of them are not even in the

same universe. Okay, let's start with

what you can actually see. By now,

you've already seen all the specs of the

whole M5 family, I'm sure. Plus, you can

get this from the Apple website. But

here's a speedrun of all the important

items that affect developers. 14-in M5

base model. The M5s don't come any

bigger. M5 Pro and M5 Max are in 16in

because that's how I prefer it. I have

more real estate for my code. personal

preference. You can argue me in the

comments. Since I'm looking at

performance, the key numbers are 10 CPU

cores on the M5 versus 18 CPU cores on

the Pro and the Max. These are just the

models I have. There's other variations.

One fan on the M5, two fans on the Pro

and the Max. Now, the memory bandwidth

that roughly doubles at each step. 153

GB per second, 307 GB per second, and

614 GB per second. Although those are

just theoretical numbers and I'll show

you the real numbers later. Two things

to flag before we start testing. The Pro

and the Max get Thunderbolt 5, three of

those. The M5, Thunderbolt 4, two times

slower. And both the Pro and the Max

support high power mode, and that lets

you push the fans harder for sustained

workloads. The M5, well, that one

doesn't have that option. You only get

the dial it down low power mode option,

not push it harder like the M5 Pro and

the M5 Max. Keep it in mind, it's going

to come back later.

Every time you clone a repository,

install dependencies, or open a project,

or download an AI model, that's your SSD

is hitting. And there are actually three

different speed stories here depending

on what you're doing. Oh, what? SSD

speeds are much faster on the M5 Pro and

the Mac since Apple adopted PCIe Gen 5.

And dis speed depend on the size of the

drive. Higher capacity models have more

nan chips for parallel access. And they

also have larger SLC caches. And you can

see that here. My M5 Max has 4 TB, M5

Pro has 2 TB, and this one has 512 GB.

These are some crazy numbers, and even

the slowest one here should be enough

for most use cases. For reference, the

M4 at 512 gigs did about 2600 megabytes

per second read. The M5 Max at 4 tab,

7,200. Now, the M5 Pro and Max, 13,200,

13,500, and for right, 15,400, and

17,300.

That's roughly double what the M4 Max

did. That's PCIe Gen 5 at work. M5 is no

slouch either. That's like 2 and a half

times faster than M4. But is that what

real file operations look like? I copied

a 4.5 GB LLM file from one folder to

another on the internal SSD. The M5 2.1

GB per second. The M5 Pro 8.9 and the M5

Max 10.4. Real numbers. And that

confirms the synthetic story. PCIe Gen 5

on the Pro and Max is real and you can

see it in raw sequential copies. Then I

copied the entire WebKit source tree.

Over half a million files, 43 GB in tiny

source code files. Can you imagine how

long it took him to write that? And they

didn't vip code that. M5 260 megabytes

per second. M5 Pro 276, M5 Max 306. A

little different, huh? But only an 18%

spread between the M5 and the M5 Max. So

for internal mini file operations, all

three machines handle metadata roughly

about the same speed. The internal SSD

controller isn't the differentiator

here. So, how fast can you move data to

an external drive? This is about the

Thunderbolt bus, not the internal SSD. I

plugged identical Thunderbolt external

SSDs into all three machines and copy

the same 5 GB model files. The M5 on

Thunderbolt 4 about 1.4 GB per second,

right? 3.9 read. And now we see a big

difference. The M5 Pro on Thunderbolt

5.4 right 9.6 read. and the M5 Max

nearly 6 gigabytes per second right and

almost 11 read clean scaling Thunderbolt

4 caps the M5 and the Max's faster

internal SSD controller gives it an edge

over the Pro, a slight edge even though

they're both on Thunderbolt 5. Then I

did the same thing with the half a

million small files. The M5 and the M5

Pro essentially identical 67 to 69

megabytes per second, right? Nearly 10

minutes each. Thunderbolt 5 didn't help

at all here. The bottleneck isn't the

bus bandwidth, it's IOPS and file system

metadata. The M5 Max five times faster

at 336 megabytes per second. That's the

different storage controller doing its

job. And that's what real dev workflows

actually look like. Cloning a repo,

copying node modules. Node modules. Oh

boy. So when somebody says my SSD

benchmark is at 7 gigs a second, ask

them what they're copying. AI coding

tools are fast. The problem is the

overhead they create. I still end up

testing different models, weighing

answers, and turning scattered output

into a plan myself. Verdant is the first

tool I've used that manages the workflow

around the code, not just the code

itself. Take multiplan mode. Instead of

picking one model and hoping it was the

right call, Verdant has three leading

models weigh in together. So, I've got a

net issue tracker I maintain, and I

asked Verdon to plan out a new dashboard

feature for me. Claude came back with a

detailed productionready approach that

keeps the new stuff isolated and safe.

Gemini went the other direction, more of

a fast prototype that just modifies

what's already there. Verdant takes both

and gives me one consolidated plan that

I can refine or just let it run. From

there, I pick the model and effort level

for implementation. And with the help of

the right skill, ASP.NET Core in this

case, we're off to the races. There's

also a multiode code review built in.

Verdant's own benchmarks have it beating

Codex connector on precision and recall

using 40% less tokens. And at any point

I can pop into VS Code to keep an eye on

things because I've still got some

control issues I'm working through. But

I'm getting better. This one's for

people who are already building with AI

but are tired of managing the workflow

around it. It's less about piling more

AI and more about cutting the busy work

AI creates in the first place. You can

check out Verdant at the link in the

description. Now back to the video. Now,

let's get into the dev tests. And I'm

going to start with the ones where these

machines are surprisingly close before

we get to what they're not close at.

Speedometer and Jetream, the classic

browser benchmarks. And as expected,

these are close. The M5 already has a

strong single core CPU. And since these

are all the same, pretty much the same

core, and these tests are mostly

singlethreaded JavaScript work, the gap

between the M5 and the M5 Max here is

not that huge. 61.4 4 on the M5, 60.2 on

the M5 Pro, and 61.7 on the M5 Max. And

there's your Jetream results, too.

Slightly more detailed, has a few more

different workloads, and that could

explain potentially the slight

difference we see in the test results.

But that is the point. Everyday browser

responsiveness, web app snappiness,

you're not going to feel a big

difference between these machines. So,

this is for the dev testing perspective

and the end user perspective. The M5 is

fast. That is not where the money goes.

So, where does it start to matter? Let's

add more cores to the equation. This is