Apple hardware and the software that runs on it, tested on devices we own.
Battery, thermals, and real performance — measured, with the method published
alongside every number.
A four-year-old MacBook Pro with a worn battery ran every benchmark we gave it at full speed on battery power. The largest gap we measured between plugged in and unplugged was 1.2%, which is inside the noise this machine produces run to run. On Apple Silicon, the belief that unplugging costs you performance did not … Read more
We benchmarked the same MacBook Pro twice, an hour apart, and got results 20% apart. The machine did not change. What was running on it did. Worse, the contaminated run produced a conclusion that was flatly wrong: it showed the older M4 Pro beating the newer M5 Pro. We nearly published that. The two runs … Read more
We ran three MacBook Pros flat out for eight minutes each and none of them slowed down. The oldest machine, a four-year-old 14-inch M1 Pro, finished its last pass 2.1% slower than its first. The newest finished 0.5% faster. On this workload, thermal throttling did not happen. We went in expecting the opposite, and the … Read more
After 264 charge cycles and roughly four years of daily use, our M1 Pro reports 86% of its original battery capacity. A near-new M4 Pro at 72 cycles reports 99%, and an M5 Pro at 5 cycles reports 100%. Those three numbers are the whole article, and they are worth more than any manufacturer estimate … Read more
We ran the same browser benchmark on five Apple devices we own, and a phone finished ahead of a 13-inch iPad Pro. The margin was thin enough that we will not call it a win — but a $1,299 tablet and a phone landing in the same class was not the result we expected, and … Read more
If you are still on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, the case for replacing it is weaker than the marketing suggests and stronger than the spec sheet does — and which one applies to you depends on a single question: does your heavy work run on the CPU, or on the video encoder? We own … Read more
Apple’s specification pages for the M5 Pro list a CPU core count. They do not tell you what the cores are called, and the names turned out to be the interesting part. Open Activity Monitor’s CPU History window on a 16-inch M5 Pro and you will find eighteen cores in two groups: twelve labelled Performance … Read more
If you are on an M4 Pro, skip this generation. Across every test we ran, the M5 Pro was between 6% and 9% faster — a gap you will not feel. If you are on an M1 Pro, the answer depends entirely on what you do with the machine: we measured anywhere from 1.40x to … Read more