Apple Silicon is an impressive piece of engineering and innovation, impressing me, time and time again, with its performance and headroom, but I’ve run into a constant roadblock: too many tabs. Now, for the first time, I may have found, in the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro, a system that is immune to tab fill and never shows me that dreaded spinning pinwheel.
I’ve been using the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro 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 virtually every Apple Silicon Mac since the iconic MacBook Air M1, there always comes a time in my work where Chrome tabs (I run Chrome instead of Safari because my office usually runs Google apps like Gmail, Drive, Meet, etc.) and other apps I normally use, like Adobe Photoshop, slow down or become unresponsive and I see the rainbow pinwheel. spinning while I wait for the system to recover and give me back control.
To be clear, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro never fail. There’s no blue screen of death in macOS (including the lovely new Liquid Glass-clad Tahoe), just a slowdown or what looks like a backup on a busy street. I usually try to wait patiently for the system to arrive and then start closing the browser tabs.
However, things have been different with my 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro, 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 tabs of the ChatGPT Atlas
- photoshop
- fast time
on two screens. The 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 not only seems comfortable with the situation but also full of life.
Switching between Photoshop and my endless tabs is not a problem. If anything, the system seems hungry for more. As I write this, I’ve opened half a dozen more tabs 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 have?”
I feel like, for the first time, Apple has harnessed 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 all shove tabs down the throats of our computers.
Who cares if Apple brought exactly no design and external hardware updates? I’m delighted that the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro is finally up to the… or, er… task.
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