Nice. The iPads generally measure around ~8% slower than the MacBooks, I guess for cooling reasons. So we should see approximately a 4400 single core Geekbench score for the MacBook series. This is nice.
About 10% faster for single-core and 16% faster for multi-core compared to the M4. The iPad M5 has the same number of cores and the same clock speed as the M4, but has increased the RAM from 8GB to 12GB.
Currently switch between the M2 Pro and the M4 Air, and the Air is noticeable snappier in everyday tasks. The 17' M3 Pro is the faster machine, but I prefer not to lug it around all day, so it gets left home and occasionally used by the wife.
It feels like Intel and AMD are asleep at the wheel with their mobile lineup. I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+.
For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
I find this usually doesn't matter as much as you seem to suggest.
I've been running linux laptops with AMD/intel for years, and while some focus on more battery life would be welcome, the cpu never bothered me.
My primary limiation is available RAM (esp. when debugging react native against a complete local docker setup), which unfortunately on both AMD/Intel but far more so on Apple is usually limited to higher compute CPU's, which drives up cost of laptop (not even including the extra cost of RAM on Apple).
The only really locally CPU intensive processes I run on a laptop are Rust builds, and then still I would prioritize RAM over CPU if that would be possible, because Rust builds are fast enough, especially when incrementally compiling (and I almost never do lto release-like builds locally unless doing benchmarking or profiling work)
> I've been looking at non-apple equivalents that have similar performance/power as the M lineup and it seems they all lag about 20%+.
Most of it can be explained away with TSMC. If you compared Apple's 5nm parts (M2), with AMD's 4nm parts, you'll see the performance swing in just about the same magnitude but in favor of AMD. M5 is 3rd gen 3nm.
I own an M4 iPad Pro and can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower, given iPadOS's limitations. The rumors about an upcoming touchscreen Mac are interesting, perhaps Apple will deign to make their ridiculously overpowered SOCs usable for general purpose computing. A man can dream..
The iPadOS limitations are largely orthogonal to being able to make use of the available performance, IMO. For example, search in large PDFs could certainly still be faster, and I don’t think it particularly suffers from iPadOS limitations.
I bought an M4 iPad Pro and ended up returning it because I just don't like the magic keyboard. My current iPad is from 2018 and I use the Smart Keyboard Folio and (for me) it's just about perfect. Small, lightweight, not too expensive, easy to clean, and works great.
I've been hoping there were enough people like me that a third party would make a replacement but that never happened.
I know my current iPad Pro won't last forever so I suppose I'll end up with a Magic Keyboard setup eventually.
I just don't understand the iPad + Magic Keyboard. Combined, they weigh as much as a macbook, which has a much better pad+KB and an OS that isn't crippled.
iPad M5 vs M4 [1], this is coming from leaked unbox video of M5 iPad Pro. So it should be legit.
Single-Core Score 4133 3748 110.3%
Multi-Core Score 15437 13324 115.9%
Same maximum clock speed. So assuming no special thermals solution on the new iPad Pro such as vapour chamber. This is 10% pure IPC improvements although the M5 has 6MB L2 Cache. 2MB higher than M4.
Not shown here are the E-Core performance. Which if we were to trust the A19 Pro test they are 20 to 30% higher than previous generations. And GPU is also a lot faster on A19 Pro.
M5 also comes with 12GB Memory as baseline, which is 4GB higher than M4 you get on iPad Pro. I hope M5 MacBook Air continues to get 16GB as baseline, looking like a very decent upgrade for anyone that is on M1 or still on Intel platform. Would be perfect if MacBook Air gets Vapour Chamber like iPhone Pro. I don't mind paying slightly more for it.
Shame this fantastic, carefully engineered and unique technology is locked behind closed source drivers, non-upgradable hardware and tamper resistent boot processes. I love apple silicon... if only they would launch some sort of product or documentation allowing M-series processors to be practical for more general purpose computing...
Damn impressive if true, but I’ll be honest, I still don’t feel the need to replace my M1 iPad Pro or my M1 Pro Macbook Pro. They’re both more than amazing for my use cases - though if Apple suddenly took gaming seriously, like extending Rosetta to act as a translation layer for Windows games a la Proton, I’d gladly throw down for an M5 Ultra when it’s released.
I know Asahi is in choppy waters this year, but it is a seriously impressive project in (imo) a good state. I was surprised that I could run a one-liner script and an hour later play a 32-bit windows x86 3D openGL game on an ARM apple machine with reasonable performance.
> To registered developers, with no upstream or downstream support whatsoever.
It's open source, you don't have to be registered with anything.
Wine already uses it.
Buy the commercial version of Wine for Mac, and you get end user support.
> It's quite exciting to have two competing standards like this,
Wine is the single open standard here.
> Being a fork of Wine, Proton maintains very similar compatibility with Windows applications as its upstream counterpart... Proton generally lags behind its upstream Wine base by several releases.
Apple and Valve are just providing layers that translate graphics API calls from the Windows standard DirectX API to Metal on Mac or Vulkan on Linux that Wine can use to support games on those platforms.
However, Proton lags behind on features available in the newer versions of upstream Wine.
Yup. I've got an M1 Pro from work, and while I'm looking forward to hopefully getting an M5 in December, I really don't know if it will be a significant increase in my daily tasks or enjoyment. I do have an M4 Pro Mini that's a bit snappier, but it isn't night and day difference.
Why should you need to replace your M1 machine? Quality products tend to stay with us for a longer time. Apple still has billions of people without any of their devices to sell their new machines to.
AMD used to have a 3 core desktop CPU. IIRC it was because one of the intended 4 cores was bad but they could salvage the package by making it 3 cores. The 3 core option was so popular, that they kept it once the 4th core issues were resolve with a software patch. Clever people figured out how to enable it once installed and got a 4th core for free. Never used it myself, and only heard tales about it. Could be urban legend.
Some models of the M4 iPad had 3P + 6E = 9 cores as well, so it's certainly not unusual. Like another commenter said, the "why" can be binning for chips which come out with a broken P core.
I'm not especially impressed that Apple came up with a mobile CPU that pretty much doubles the performance of the three year old Ryzen 6850u in my Thinkpad. What I'm impressed with is it's doing that in an iPad, which presumably doesn't have a fan.
Intel's best single core score is listed as 3240 for the Core i9-14900KS, a 250W desktop monster chip. Is this score of 4133 for an equivalent test? Is Intel that far behind?
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadLeaked unboxing video reveals unannounced M5 iPad Pro in full - https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/30/leaked-unboxing-video-reveals...
https://x.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518 | https://xcancel.com/markgurman/status/1973048229932507518
Exclusive! Unboxing the iPad Pro with the M5 before Apple! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnzkC2q-iGI
Single thread MacBook progression on Geekbench:
M1: 2350
M2: 2600
M3: 3100
M4: 3850
M5: 4400 (estimated)
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseli...
About 10% faster for single-core and 16% faster for multi-core compared to the M4. The iPad M5 has the same number of cores and the same clock speed as the M4, but has increased the RAM from 8GB to 12GB.
M1 (16Gb)
M1 Pro (16Gb)
M2 Pro (16Gb)
M3 Pro (32Gb)
M4 Air (24Gb)
Currently switch between the M2 Pro and the M4 Air, and the Air is noticeable snappier in everyday tasks. The 17' M3 Pro is the faster machine, but I prefer not to lug it around all day, so it gets left home and occasionally used by the wife.
For $800 the M4 Air just seems like one of the best tech deals around.
Not at all, you are stuck with a machine that has only 256GB of ssd(and not upgradeable) and 60hz LCD screen, also only 2 IO ports.
the M4 maybe the best mobile CPU, but that does not mean it will make every machine with it the best.
I've been running linux laptops with AMD/intel for years, and while some focus on more battery life would be welcome, the cpu never bothered me.
My primary limiation is available RAM (esp. when debugging react native against a complete local docker setup), which unfortunately on both AMD/Intel but far more so on Apple is usually limited to higher compute CPU's, which drives up cost of laptop (not even including the extra cost of RAM on Apple).
The only really locally CPU intensive processes I run on a laptop are Rust builds, and then still I would prioritize RAM over CPU if that would be possible, because Rust builds are fast enough, especially when incrementally compiling (and I almost never do lto release-like builds locally unless doing benchmarking or profiling work)
Most of it can be explained away with TSMC. If you compared Apple's 5nm parts (M2), with AMD's 4nm parts, you'll see the performance swing in just about the same magnitude but in favor of AMD. M5 is 3rd gen 3nm.
Look at glassy UIs. Worth it.
Did everyone forget that these chips started in general purpose MacBooks and were later put in the iPad?
If general purpose computing is the goal you can get a cheap Mac Mini
I've been hoping there were enough people like me that a third party would make a replacement but that never happened.
I know my current iPad Pro won't last forever so I suppose I'll end up with a Magic Keyboard setup eventually.
Single-Core Score 4133 3748 110.3%
Multi-Core Score 15437 13324 115.9%
Same maximum clock speed. So assuming no special thermals solution on the new iPad Pro such as vapour chamber. This is 10% pure IPC improvements although the M5 has 6MB L2 Cache. 2MB higher than M4.
Not shown here are the E-Core performance. Which if we were to trust the A19 Pro test they are 20 to 30% higher than previous generations. And GPU is also a lot faster on A19 Pro.
M5 also comes with 12GB Memory as baseline, which is 4GB higher than M4 you get on iPad Pro. I hope M5 MacBook Air continues to get 16GB as baseline, looking like a very decent upgrade for anyone that is on M1 or still on Intel platform. Would be perfect if MacBook Air gets Vapour Chamber like iPhone Pro. I don't mind paying slightly more for it.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/14173685?baseli...
Edit: Let me double down, macOS 26 is the worst OS that Apple has shipped in the last two decades.
All the premier modal providers are losing money hand over fist even at $100's a month in subscription fees.
M5 Ultra/M5 Extreme/M5 Super?
Not much else I can think of as well.
M1 is still insane. Apps, OS emulation... just chuggs along.
Apple already provides the translation layer to convert from DirectX 11 or 12 to Metal that Wine uses on Macs.
https://wccftech.com/apple-game-porting-toolkit-2-supports-a...
Proton does the exact same thing, only it translates DirectX into the Graphics API that Wine on Linux uses.
The new thing is that the M5 versions of the GPU cores picked up a 40% performance boost, on the version that just shipped on the new iPhones.
To registered developers, with no upstream or downstream support whatsoever.
> Proton does the exact same thing
For everyone, with upstream and downstream vendoring.
It's quite exciting to have two competing standards like this, it really makes you wonder which one developers will side with.
It's open source, you don't have to be registered with anything.
Wine already uses it.
Buy the commercial version of Wine for Mac, and you get end user support.
> It's quite exciting to have two competing standards like this,
Wine is the single open standard here.
> Being a fork of Wine, Proton maintains very similar compatibility with Windows applications as its upstream counterpart... Proton generally lags behind its upstream Wine base by several releases.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
Apple and Valve are just providing layers that translate graphics API calls from the Windows standard DirectX API to Metal on Mac or Vulkan on Linux that Wine can use to support games on those platforms.
However, Proton lags behind on features available in the newer versions of upstream Wine.
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-13-inch-m...