Apple Silicon is an impressive bit of engineering and innovation that impresses me time and time again with its performance and headroom, but I’ve run into one consistent stumbling block: too many tabs. Now, for the first time, I may have found, in the MacBook Pro 14-inch M5, a system that is impervious to plugging and never shows me the dreaded spinning needle wheel.
I’ve been using the MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 for almost a week, ditching the equally impressive M4 model in favor of a system that promises 20% better multithreaded performance.
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With pretty much every Apple Silicon Mac since the iconic MacBook Air M1, there always comes a moment in my work where Chrome tabs (I run Chrome instead of Safari because my office generally runs on Google apps like Gmail, Drive, Meets, etc.) and other apps I normally run like Adobe Photoshop slow down or stop responding and I see the rotating rainbow wheel while I wait for the system to get back to me.
To be clear, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro never crash. There’s no blue screen of death in macOS (including the lovely new Liquid Glass-encased Tahoe), just braking or what feels like a backup on a busy thoroughfare. I usually try to wait patiently for the system and then go about closing browser tabs.
However, things have been different with my MacBook Pro 14-inch M5, which is configured with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage ($1,799 / £1,799 / AU$2,799).
As I write this, I am currently running
- 37 Chrome tabs
- 2 Safari tabs
- 6 ChatGPT Atlas tabs
- Photoshop
- Quicktime
across two screens. The MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 seems not only comfortable with the situation, but also spicy.
Switching between Photoshop and my endless tabs is not a problem. If anything, the system seems hungry for more. As I write this, I have half a dozen more tabs open in Safari and just as many in Chrome (plus a few in Atlas).
Did the MacBook Pro 14 just smile at me and say, “Is that all you got?”
I feel that for the first time Apple has tapped into the full potential of Apple Silicon and productivity for the masses. Yes, there are those who will produce graphics, music, coding and games on these workhorses, but for the vast majority of the workforce, it’s the browser and tabs that matter. We’re all stuffing down our computers’ gullets.
Who cares if Apple brought exactly zero design and external hardware updates? I’m excited that the MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 is finally ready for the tab… or er… task.
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