The One Pick - Page 2 of 2 - one question, one answer

Apple Renamed Its Mac CPU Cores. Your Spec Sheet Now Means Something Else.

September 18, 2026September 15, 2026 by TK Lee

Photograph of a 16-inch MacBook Pro screen showing Activity Monitor's CPU History window with all eighteen cores. Cores 1 to 12 are labelled Performance and cores 13 to 18 are labelled Super. No core is labelled Efficiency.

The M5 Pro reports 6 super cores and 12 performance cores. No group is called Efficiency any more, so 18 cores and 14 cores are no longer the same kind of number.

M1 Pro vs M4 Pro vs M5 Pro MacBook Pro: What Four Years Actually Buys You

September 18, 2026September 15, 2026 by TK Lee

Three MacBook Pros open side by side on a desk, each running Activity Monitor's CPU History window: a 14-inch M1 Pro, a 14-inch M4 Pro, and a 16-inch M5 Pro.

Three generations, one desk, the same workloads. The M5 Pro is 6–9% ahead of the M4 Pro — and 1.4× to 2.4× ahead of the M1 Pro, depending entirely on what you do.