Early benchmarks for Apple’s latest Mac processors have emerged. They tell us that the all-new MacBook Neo can and will deliver a great experience for everyday tasks like browsing the web, using apps, or all the other tasks they aim to support. They also tell us that Apple now offers the fastest consumer PC processor on the planet with the M5 Max MacBook Pro, which has the highest single- and multi-core scores in the business.

Perhaps one way to articulate the computational power inside both devices is to understand the difference between single- and multi-core tasks. Single-core tasks encompass things like web surfing, opening apps, writing an email or document, or all the other basic chores we do all the time. Multi-core is all about video editing, gaming, 3D-modelling, and AI model creation — high-end tasks that need a lot of computing power. 

A machine with high multi-core scores is better for pros, while for everything else we look to high single-core scores. When you think about it, it is inevitable that the dedicated M-series Macs will offer a better balance of both — but even with the iPhone 16’s A18 pro chip, the MacBook Neo is still an impressive budget-priced system for everyday tasks.

How do the new Macs perform?

With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the early scores. These might fluctuate as the new Macs ship and get tested, but they will almost certainly be in the same ball park:

M5 Max MacBook Pro 

• Single-core score: 4,268
• Multi-core score: 29,233

MacBook Neo

• Single-core score: 3,461
• Multi-core score: 8,668

For comparison, the M1 MacBook Air delivers the following:

• Single-core score: 2,346
• Multi-core score: 8,342

The M4 MacBook Air from last year provides:

• Single-core score: 3,696
• Multi-core score: 14,731

While the 14-in./ M5 MacBook Pro (reviewed here) can promise:

• Single-core score: 4,228
• Multi-core score: 17,460.

What do you need?

What these data points show is that for everyday use, any of the above Macs will do what you need. (The MacBook Neo will probably do those tasks noticeably faster than a M1 MacBook Air —and only slightly less swiftly than some more recent Macs.)

Meanwhile, running those more advanced professional tasks on the latest M5 Max Macs will pretty much eat everybody else’s lunch and still leave you with enough computational horsepower for more. Even a Ryzen 5950X chip, with its 12,016 multi-core performance, is outclassed. The highest-end Macs are 2.4x faster, meaning Macs now lead the PC industry.

Of course, performance isn’t just about running a Keynote presentation or creating your first video blog in Final Cut Pro (which needs a “video blogging” setting), performance is also about the things you don’t see quite so often.

In this day and age, it means how well your systems run artificial intelligence. We know that every single one of these Macs will run Apple Intelligence, which is Apple’s platform-based approach to AI, so we can also surmise they’ll be able to handle large language models (LLMs) from third parties, as well. 

Even the Neo will do this, given it’s just as capable as the iPhone 16 whose chip it uses, though memory will constrain performance; if you are searching for an AI PC, Apple will point you to its other more powerful Macs with higher multi-core performance. 

AI is the future; Apple hardware is ready

If AI is the future, then Apple’s new Macs are built to run that future. That’s going to be of more importance as the rapidly compounding energy, political, security, and component crises highlight how AI services are best run at the edge, need to respect sovereign data privacy boundaries, and can be seen as commodities that need platforms on which to play.

Apple is the world’s leading AI PC, even including the MacBook Neo to some extent.

The data in this case doesn’t lie. From the high-end all the way down to entry-level general purpose devices, Apple now has a Mac for everyone, and an iPad or iPhone for everybody else. None of this is by accident, all of it is by design, and to a huge extent the success of these deployments reflects the massive success of what the company has achieved in silicon design. It’s going to show in growing Mac market share this year, even while the overall PC industry continues its decline.

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