I’ve been a PC gamer since the early 1990s, and over the past three and a bit decades I’ve never once regretted my allegiance to those awkward beige boxes that have brought so much joy into the lives of myself and so many other people.

Yes, they can be expensive. Sure, they're more complex and frustrating than consoles. There have been times I’ve sat down to play a game, only for hours to pass as I try to fix game-breaking crashes, reinstall drivers, or just generally swear at Windows; but at the end of the day, I was always convinced that the PC remained the greatest gaming platform in the world.

PCs (and I’m including my beloved Amiga A500+ here) were always miles ahead of consoles when it came to graphics and audio, and the ability to upgrade components meant you could remain at the cutting edge for years. Upgrading and even building your own PC was fiddly and expensive, but it was also fun and rewarding. I still get a thrill when I first power-up a newly built rig and see it successfully boot.

The openness of the platform (despite Microsoft’s best efforts) meant I could buy games from where ever I wanted (one of the main reasons, I believe, why PC games are usually cheaper than console games), and play obscure indie games that would never be published on consoles due to licensing costs (which is another reason why PC games are cheaper); and, with some tweaking and a bit of (perfectly ethical and legal) emulation, backwards compatibility has never been a problem. The likes of GOG should get a shoutout as well for keeping very old PC games running on new hardware.

And right now in 2026, I'm lucky enough to have access to the most powerful PC gaming hardware ever, on which to play some of the best and most graphically impressive PC games ever made. I should be feeling like there’s never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Instead, however, it feels like PC gaming has never been worse.

Thanks for the memory

Why am I so down on the current state of PC gaming? For a start, while PC gaming hardware has never been better, it’s also never been so expensive — and that makes it less accessible for most people. The price of graphics cards has skyrocketed, and SSDs and RAM, once two of the cheapest and most effective ways of upgrading your PC, are now ridiculously expensive.

According to PC Part Picker, the average price of two sticks of 16GB DDR5 memory has leapt from around $150 to over $600 in the space of 18 months. Meanwhile, 64GB of the stuff has gone from around $250 to over $1,250 — and this isn’t even for the fastest models.

Even older DDR4 isn’t immune, with 16GB rising over 18 months from $50 on average to around $170, again according to PC Part Picker.

People are getting priced out of PC gaming, or being prevented from even considering it; and as a PC gamer, that’s heart-breaking. I’m incredibly fortunate that my job has enabled me to build a PC with an RTX 5090 and 96GB of DDR5 RAM, but there’s no joy in writing about things that so few people will be able to experience.

With prices of gaming components, PCs, laptops, and even consoles climbing ever higher, sales are understandably dropping. And with the costs of developing games exploding, we’ve also seen huge amounts of very talented game developers lose their jobs, and entire companies, such as BioWare, close down.

Perhaps worst of all, this past week I’ve found myself agreeing with something Elon Musk — someone I genuinely think is an awful human being — said. I need a lie down. And a pint (probably not in that order). I’m in a PC gaming funk, but who — or what — is to blame?

AI. It’s AI’s fault

Now it would be far too easy, simplistic, and perhaps even lazy to say this is all AI’s fault. But it’s all AI’s fault. Screw AI.

The AI goldrush has seen an explosion in the number of data centers required to run and train large language models (LLMs) used by AIs, and these need a lot of memory, which has led to a global shortage and made prices for components that use memory, such as RAM, graphics cards and storage, skyrocket.

I, like many other PC gamers, have been watching all of this in horror for a while now, but things really came into sharp relief this week when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one of the biggest culprits of the RAMpocalypse, was quoted as saying on the Cheeky Pint podcast (via IGN) that "it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer."

A lot of people took that as Altman accusing us PC gamers of being greedy by wanting RAM for our rigs, and to say that didn’t go down well would be an understatement.

Now, I usually have a policy of ignoring the rubbish Altman spews out (it does wonders for my blood pressure); but I have to admit, when I saw the quote, it riled me up. PC gamers having to endure the RAMpocalypse is bad enough, but to be blamed for it, especially when all we want to do is play games, was too much.

Then, in a real-life example of the ‘worst person you know just made a great point’ meme, the world’s richest man, terrible Diablo player, and failed truck salesman, Elon Musk, piped up to say “The people deserve to have their RAM too!”

I’m not naïve enough to think that Musk is seriously on the side of ‘the people’, but when one of the most widely-mocked individuals on the internet gets some begrudging props for coming out against something you said, that’s not a good sign.

Sure enough, Altman backpeddled, saying he was “taken out of context”, and he was actually complaining about people running local AI models. In a way, I’m inclined to believe that — as CEO he has a vested interest in stopping people using their own models and instead using OpenAI’s, but the damage was done.

Regardless of context, it was a tone-deaf thing to say — almost as bad as Nvidia’s 'GeForce 8800 GTX — 20 Years of a Legend' tech demo, which was released this week. Nvidia once was loved, or at least respected, by a lot of PC gamers for making genuinely excellent graphics cards and pushing the PC gaming industry forward with various innovations over the years.

Sadly, it has also become incredibly successful due to AI — so successful that it often feels like it's lost interest in the PC gaming industry that made its name, with rumors swirling that it’s ending production of the RTX 5090, while doing nothing about the rising costs of its components thanks to an AI bubble which it's benefitting from and contributing to.

So, when it launched a demo that invited players to relive a time when PC gaming was actually fun and affordable, by allowing them to virtually install its iconic GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card into a retro Windows Vista PC, it felt like Nvidia had misjudged the mood. To make matters worse, Nvidia recommends you have an RTX 5080 to play it — a GPU that is incredibly expensive and hard to find due to the memory shortage, and which is also rumored to be for the chop.

“Oh well,” some of us PC gamers might have thought, “at least we still have perpetual underdog AMD in our corner.” Except, AMD CEO Lisa Su has just been quoted as saying that “We are a data center first company.”

As Nvidia’s closest competitor, AMD was supposed to keep Team Green on its toes, while having a more consumer-friendly approach (being more open to open-source, and not limiting its latest tech to just its own GPUs, for example). Instead, it looks like AMD has had a heel-turn worthy of WWC’s most dramatic betrayals.

To be honest, I’ve been wondering what’s going on with AMD for a while, as it was rather quiet this year in the consumer GPU space; but this turn to the AI-powered dark side still hurts.

Could we really see the two major GPU makers stop making graphics cards altogether? It’s too bleak a future to imagine, but after a week like this, I can’t help but wonder.

What can we do?

I don’t want this to just be a wall of depressing text that would make even Roger Waters think ‘that’s a bit much’, so is there a glimmer of hope to be had? Is there anything any of us can do?

At Computex 2026 this year in Taiwan, I was perplexed by how almost every PC maker was going on about AI-in-everything with a fervor that I’ve just not seen replicated by consumers. I was worried that I was just out of touch.

But there’s been a growing backlash against rampant AI that’s given me hope. I’m not against all forms of AI, but AI that takes work from humans, that plagiarizes human art (including depressing walls of texts written by aging tech journalists), that diminishes creativity and sucks up resources… that AI I would love to see the end of, and I’m not the only one.

Boycotting games made with AI, and avoiding companies that don’t use AI responsibly, can hopefully show companies that this isn’t a magic money tree that they should neglect their customers for. Look at what’s happening with the current stock-market rout on AI companies, where it seems voters were rebelling against rampant AI data center expansion and an administration that seemed all too happy to let tech companies cross lines and drop ethics all in the name of AI (sorry, SI) supremacy.

I don’t want to seen an economic meltdown; but a wake-up call to the likes of Nvidia and AMD, to let them know that the customers who made them — primarily PC gamers like me — aren’t to be taken for granted, would certainly be welcome.

At a glance: Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display scorecard

How the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display scored in our review

Value

3

Design

4.5

Performance

5

Battery life

5

Overall

4.5

Group 1 Data

Product	Value ()	Design ()	Performance ()	Battery life ()	Overall ()
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	3	4.5	5	5	4.5

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max): Value for money

Starting at $2,899 / £2,899 / AU$4,599 for the 14-inch version, and $3,399 / £3,399 / AU$5,499 for the 16-inch model, and going all the way up to an astonishing $14,549 / £14,549 / AU$22,424 for the fully specced-out model, the question of value isn’t so much about price, but about what this laptop can enable you to do.

Put simply, if you just want a MacBook that will excel at day-to-day tasks you’d be much better off buying a MacBook Air (M5), and even for more ambitious workloads, the recently-announced MacBook Pro (M6), which starts at $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$3,199, will likely more than suffice. Neither of those, of course, feature a touchscreen, but I wouldn’t suggest buying any model of the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display for the touchscreen alone.

Thankfully, this version of the MacBook Pro has other features that help to justify the higher price tag, including tandem OLED screen technology, a lighter design, and more powerful components. Despite being older than the M6 chip, both the M5 Pro and M5 Max outperform it, so if you need a seriously powerful laptop, and image quality is of the utmost importance, the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display could be a worthy investment, especially if its raw performance means you can complete projects faster, allowing you to take on more work, for example.

If you don’t need that kind of horsepower, then there are much more affordable options you should consider, tempting as the touchscreen functionality or OLED display might be.

Compared to rival RTX Spark laptops, the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is much more competitive. The Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark starts at $4,399.99 / £3,899.99 / AU$7,999, though it comes with a lot more memory, packing 64GB.

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max): Design

• PROLED XDR screen is a clear highlight
• Slightly lighter than previous models
• iPhone-like Dynamic Island replaces the controversial ‘notch’ around the webcam

Given that the MacBook Pro design hasn’t changed in years, the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display in both size variants comes with some major tweaks in this department. This isn’t, though, the kind of overhaul we saw when Apple introduced the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pros that replaced the 15-inch and 13-inch models, respectively, around five years ago; instead, this is a more subtle refinement of the design, and pretty much all of the tweaks are a result of the new display, so let’s start there.

Apple calls the new PROLED XDR screen "the best display on a laptop" and, to be fair, it has a good reason to be boastful. Previous screens on the MacBook Pro were already pretty darn good, and now Apple has swapped the mini-LED tech for tandem OLED. This essentially uses two layers of organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) on top of each other, rather than just a single layer, so peak brightness can go even higher, while the display can remain power-efficient. The PROLED XDR screen can achieve 2,000 nits of peak brightness, whereas the mini-LED screen of previous MacBook Pros had a peak brightness of 1,600.

1

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SDXC Card Slot

Memory card slot for importing photos and videos straight from your camera

HDMI & USB-C port

On the right-hand side there's a full size HDMI port and one of three USB-C Thunderbolt 5 ports

Touch ID button

This button powers on the MacBook Pro, and can scan your fingerprint to log in

Side view of the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)

Explore

Combine that with the usual benefits we’ve come to expect from OLED displays, namely the higher contrast ratios and lack of halo effects (where there’s noticeable bloom surrounding light colors that bleeds into pixels that should be showing darker, or completely black, colors) that come thanks to each OLED pixel being independently controlled (including being able to be turned off completely), rather than relying on an LED backlight, which offers less precise control over the pixels in the display.

The contrast ratio of the PROLED XDR screen is an incredible 10,000,000:1, a pretty huge bump over the 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio of the previous model with a Liquid Retina XDR display. Contrast ratio is a way of comparing the brightest white to the darkest black of a display, and the greater the difference, the more vibrant the image quality, so you can forget about washed-out colors and blacks that look more gray, and enjoy rich, deep colors that really pop compared to darker tones, and even the total blackness that OLED technology enables.

While MacBook displays have supported the P3 color gamut, which is particularly important for people working with video who require accurate colors, the PROLED XDR screen also supports the Adobe RGB gamut, which offers wider coverage for green and cyan colors, and is popular with photographers and designers.

The addition of touch functionality has also had implications for the design. The hinges of the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display have been tweaked to reduce movement and flex when you touch the screen. I’d have loved it if Apple had taken this opportunity to increase the amount by which the screen can be pushed back, ideally introducing hinges to allow the touchscreen to lie flat on a desk, or even flip behind the keyboard to turn the laptop into an iPad-like device.

This would have made the redesign of the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display even more ambitious, and would have likely meant much more work for Apple to ensure the macOS operating system works with a 2-in-1 laptop form factor, but it would have made the whole idea of a touchscreen much more viable. Instead, we’re still stuck with a traditional clamshell laptop design, so touchscreen gestures require you hovering your arm over the keyboard as you jab horizontally at the screen — it's not the most natural-feeling way to interact with a device, and this was one of Steve Jobs’ biggest criticisms of touchscreen laptops when, as CEO, he dismissed the idea of Apple making one all those years ago.

The PROLED XDR screen also allows for thinner bezels around it, and the once-controversial notch that surrounded the webcam has been replaced by Apple's Dynamic Island, as seen on the iPhone, which gives you quick touch access to controls such as media playback, AirDrop sharing and accessing Spotlight. It’s one of the best examples of Apple tweaking macOS to better make use of the touchscreen, and I can confidently predict that the Dynamic Island will be less hated than the notch, which was just dead space that intruded on the desktop.

The more compact Dynamic Island and thinner bezels mean the screen of this 16-inch Pro is slightly larger than on previous models at 16.3 inches vs 16.2 inches, with a higher resolution of 3472 x 2266 pixels vs 3456 x 2234 pixels.

The OLED screen technology (and new thermal system that’s used to keep the laptop’s components cool) has also helped Apple reduce the weight of the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) by half a pound — that's 15% lighter — and make it around 1mm thinner.

The MacBook Pro was always a great showcase that proved powerful workstation laptops don’t need to be big and bulky, so it's impressive that Apple has been able to make this new model both lighter and thinner.

The final design change is a relatively minor one, but one that will likely prove to be very popular. Apple has returned to having an illuminated Apple logo on the back of the lid — it's a nod to the past, while also helping the latest MacBook Pro stand out more compared to the previous models.

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026): Specs

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max): Performance

• No M6 version with PROLED XDR Display
• Touchscreen is responsive, but not an essential addition
• Very fast SSD

I’m going to be honest: I think Apple has got itself into a little bit of a pickle with its M-series naming convention and release cadence. For a company that was often lauded for offering an elegant simplicity here, compared to the complexity of some competitors, it’s made a bit of a confusing mess.

Want the very latest M-series architecture, the M6, which is the company’s first-ever 2nm compute chip? Well, if so, you can forget about the PROLED XDR Display, as Apple is only offering it in the 14-inch MacBook Pro with Mini-LED screen. If you want the M6 and don’t care about a touchscreen or OLED, but prefer the larger 16-inch screen size, then you’re out of luck.

If you want the most powerful chips in a MacBook, then you’re left with the previous-generation M5 Pro and Max chips. But, getting an M5 Max-powered MacBook Pro doesn’t guarantee it’s the most powerful chip, as the default M5 Max chip that comes with the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch features an 18-core CPU and 32-core GPU, but you can upgrade (for $300 / £300 extra) to a more powerful M5 Max with a 40-core GPU. To be honest, unless you’re working with extremely graphically-intensive projects, the standard M5 Max chip will be more than enough, and even the M5 Pro will handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

As I mentioned, if you want the M6 generation and the improvements it brings, namely with a smaller 2nm process, which should lead to better power efficiency, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine for improved on-device AI performance, then you’ll need to forego both the PROLED XDR Display and 16-inch screen size.

Benchmarks

How the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) performed in our suite of benchmark tests

3DMark

Next >

3DMark: Steel Nomad

4402

3DMark: Steel Solar Bay

78412

020,00040,00060,00080,000

Score

3DMark

Data

Product	3DMark: Steel Nomad (Score)	3DMark: Steel Solar Bay (Score)
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	4402	78412

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: Write

13335

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: Read

12783

03,7507,50011,25015,000

Score

Blackmagic Disk Speed Data

Product	Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: Write (Score)	Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: Read (Score)
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	13335	12783

Geekbench 6.7.2: Single-Core

4359

Geekbench 6.7.2: Multi-Core

30327

Geekbench 7.1.0: Single-Core

3766

Geekbench 7.1.0: Multi-Core

35679

Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Single Precision Score

6200

Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Half Precision Score

47515

Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Quantized Score

64473

020,00040,00060,00080,000

Score

Geekbench Data

Product	Geekbench 6.7.2: Single-Core (Score)	Geekbench 6.7.2: Multi-Core (Score)	Geekbench 7.1.0: Single-Core (Score)	Geekbench 7.1.0: Multi-Core (Score)	Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Single Precision Score (Score)	Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Half Precision Score (Score)	Geekbench AI 1.8 (Core ML/Neural Engine): Quantized Score (Score)
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	4359	30327	3766	35679	6200	47515	64473

PugetBench for Adobe CC (Photoshop)

18431

PugetBench for Adobe CC (Premiere Pro)

155248

050,000100,000150,000200,000

Score

PugetBench Data

Product	PugetBench for Adobe CC (Photoshop) (Score)	PugetBench for Adobe CC (Premiere Pro) (Score)
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	18431	155248

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)

109

037.575112.5150

fps

Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Ultra, 1920 x 1200) Data

Product	Value
Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	109

1 of 5

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display model Apple sent to me for review comes with the M5 Max chip with 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, and 2TB of storage. That’s a hefty list of specs, and would set you back a similarly hefty $7,399 / £7,399 / AU$11,699.

I’ve previously tested the M5 and M5 Pro in the 14-inch MacBook Pros launched earlier this year and late last year, and as expected, the M5 Max in my 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is incredibly powerful, with macOS and its built-in apps all launching quickly and feeling fast and snappy.

When it comes to the touchscreen, macOS again feels fast and responsive, and using a finger to quickly browse up and down a website, selecting options in a dialog box or menu, and moving windows around the screen all feels natural, especially if you’ve ever used an iPhone or an iPad.

Unlike people who have only used Macs and MacBooks from the once touchscreen-phobic Apple, I’ve had extensive experience using Windows laptops and Chromebooks with touchscreens, so using one on the MacBook Pro isn’t as big of a culture shock as it might be to some. While it worked well, and there are some nice touches (forgive the pun), such as pressing down your finger on certain tools in Final Cut Pro to open up a radial menu for more precise touch control, I have to say that Windows 11, Chrome OS, and Google’s new Googlebook OS are better suited to touch controls.

This might come as little surprise, as this is Apple’s first MacBook to have a touchscreen, while Windows laptops and Chromebooks have had them for decades, and in the case of Chrome OS and Googlebook OS, Google has used its experience working on Android to develop the operating system. And, for as much grief as a lot of us (myself included) gave Windows 8 when it launched back in 2012, it inspired Microsoft to make a touchscreen-friendly interface, elements of which are still found in Windows 11, primarily with larger, easier to tap, buttons and menus.

Currently, macOS Tahoe still looks and feels like an operating system that’s best used with a traditional mouse and keyboard, because that’s what it is. But that also means some elements of the user interface, such as menus, feel a bit fiddly to control via touch.

Hopefully this will change if more MacBooks come out with touchscreens. But, because Apple has decided to put its first laptop touchscreen on its most powerful (and expensive) MacBooks, there’s a danger that the company will end up thinking that because the numbers of touchscreen MacBook users is so small, it’s not worth making big changes to the interface.

Another issue I have with Apple’s decision to put a touchscreen on its highest-end MacBook Pros, rather than a more mainstream MacBook Air or Neo — something I’ve written about — is that touchscreen gestures and controls often aren’t the best way to control a laptop when you're performing complex tasks where precision is key. Sure, you can pull up a virtual piano in Garage Band and tap on the keys on screen, but while this is handy for quick ideas, you don’t want to play or write an entire song using it.

Most professionals will have peripherals, such as physical MIDI keyboards, for precise control. It’s the same with photographers and digital artists — using your fingers to pinch and zoom an image feels fast and natural, as does scribbling some notes or doodles, but for long-term use, many professionals will use a drawing tablet. If the MacBook’s PROLED XDR Display was compatible with the Apple Pencil stylus, that would make it a more useful tool for professionals, but it's not, which is a rather odd omission.

One touchscreen-friendly change Apple has made to macOS, and which I’m a big fan of, is adding an iPhone-like Dynamic Island where the notch around the webcam used to be. Tapping this gives you quick context-relevant tools, such as media controls when watching a video. Spotlight search and Siri AI are now located here as well. This is a great addition that adds value to the MacBook Pro’s touchscreen, and I’d like to see it expanded, and more touch-friendly UI elements to make the touchscreen a must-have, rather than nice-to-have-but-far-from-essential, which is what it feels like at the moment.

The tandem OLED tech powering the PROLED XDR Display is a much bigger deal, and likely the reason why most people will consider the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display over the standard model. The previous Mini-LED screen was already one of the best displays you’d find on a laptop, and thanks to tandem OLED, this new screen is even better. Straight out of the box without needing any calibration, the colors are bright and vibrant — so much so that I was surprised to see that the screen was only at 50% brightness.

Placing my 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip and Mini-LED screen next to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch really highlighted just how much better the PROLED XDR screen is. The Mini-LED looked dimmer, despite it being at 100% brightness, even with the PROLED XDR screen remaining at 50%. Now, as I said, the Mini-LED display of the (slightly) older MacBook Pro is no slouch, so to see such a stark difference in image quality is a big deal, especially for people who want a laptop for working with photos, videos and digital art. The new support for Adobe RGB color gamut is another big plus here, though as usual for Mac devices you’ll want to turn off the True Tone feature — it tweaks the colors of the screen depending on the ambient light you’re working in, which can make what’s on the screen look better to you in that moment, but could lead to color inaccuracies in a production workflow.

I won’t delve too deep into the performance of the M5 Max, as it’s been in other Apple devices for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve used a MacBook running it (I have tested both the previous M5 and M5 Pro MacBook Pro models).

According to Apple’s benchmarks, the M5 Max is around nine times faster than the M4 Max when it comes to ‘first token performance’, while AI image generation is apparently around six times faster. If those are the kind of stats that excite you, then enjoy!

In our benchmark tests, compared to the M5 MacBook Pro with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU unsurprisingly outperformed the older MacBook Pro when it came to graphic-intensive tests. In the 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme graphics test, for example, the M5 MacBook Pro scored 73.6fps compared to the M5 Max’s 214.1fps.

With gaming, the M5 MacBook Pro hit 11fps at 1920 x 1200 with Ray Tracing set to Ultra, while the M5 Max model managed a much more playable 38.75fps. This is a good example of the graphical performance gap, but if you want a laptop to game on you’re still better off buying a dedicated gaming laptop, which is a bit of a shame, as the PROLED XDR Display makes games look fantastic.

The SSD inside the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) offers up to 14.5GB/s speeds, with Apple claiming it’s twice as fast as the SSD in the previous generation, and in our tests it scored a very good 13,334.7MB/s and 12,782.7MB/s write and read speeds, respectively. A fast SSD like this is important if you’re working on large files and complex projects.

The SSD in the Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark N1X chip scored a rather paltry 1,921MB/s write speeds in comparison. Check out our benchmark result charts for more comparisons.

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) review: Battery Life

Battery life results

How long does the battery last?

Versus Comparison Data

Attribute	Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)	Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2024, M4 Pro)	Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark
Battery life video test	24.35	21.5	11.383333333333333

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2024, M4 Pro)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark

VS

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch (2024, M4 Pro)Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark

Battery life video test (hours, mins)

+13%24:21:00

21:30:00

Our battery life benchmark involves playing a looped 1080p video at 50% brightness until the laptop turns off.

Apple has claimed the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display lasts up to 24 hours on battery when streaming videos, and up to 17 hours when browsing the web, and I found those claims to be pretty much spot on, with the device lasting an incredible 24 hours and 21 minutes in our battery test, which involves playing a looped 1080p video at 50% brightness.

It blows past the MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro, 2024), which managed 21 hours and 32 minutes in the same test, and over double the 11 hours and 23 minutes the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark hit. The MacBook Pro is able to sustain its performance when on battery life, rather than throttling it to conserve energy, so you’ll be able to go multiple work days on a single charge while still being productive, though of course the battery will drain more quickly if you’re using it for more intensive tasks.

Should I buy the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)?

Also consider

How I tested the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max)

• I used as my main work laptop for five days
• I used a variety of apps during my testing
• I have extensive experience reviewing MacBooks, laptops and Chromebooks

As soon as Apple sent me the Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max) I started using it as my daily laptop, and even wrote some of this review on it. I tested numerous apps including Photoshop, and played Cyberpunk 2077 on it to see how it performs, and to see how good the PROLED XDR Display looks. I also viewed and edited some very high-quality photos by photographer Paul Reiffer, and supplied by Apple.

Throughout my time with the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display 16-inch (2026, M5 Max), I used both the standard keyboard and touchpad, and the touchscreen.

I’ve been reviewing laptops, including MacBooks and touchscreen laptops, for nearly 20 years, and have used that experience to inform this review.

• First reviewed: November 2026
• Read more about how we test