TodayToday's edition
Three outlets measured the battery life of Apple's 16-inch OLED MacBook Pro with M5 Max at 15h57m to 24h21m, test by test. The 24-hour box figure is the M5 Pro's, and Tom's Hardware saw default mode throttle.
Hardware & Analysis DeskEdited by Ege Erten
4 min readAI-assisted
Follows our story: Apple OLED MacBook Pro Keeps M5 Pro and M5 Max, Not M6, From $2,899
Apple's 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display; the story concerns the 16-inch M5 Max.
Image: Apple
Source · Press image from the Apple Newsroom, used for news reporting (editorial use).
Three of four reviews of Apple's 16-inch OLED MacBook Pro with the M5 Max, published Nov. 5, measured battery life from 15 hours 57 minutes to 24 hours 21 minutes, depending on each outlet's test.
The four outlets agree on the bigger point: the tandem OLED panel and the battery, not the chip, are what changed. Three of them, Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide and TechRadar, belong to the same publisher, Future plc, though each ran its own tests. Fstoppers, the photography site, is the lab outside that group, and it went deepest on power and sustained load. Tom's Hardware, TechRadar and Fstoppers each reviewed the top chip, an M5 Max with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU, with 128GB of unified memory. Voltgrid has not tested the machine; every number below belongs to the outlet that measured it. Our Oct. 28 product file covered the launch specs and prices; this piece sets Apple's claims against what the reviewers found.
Apple's own battery figures need care. For the 16-inch M5 Max, Apple rates up to 22 hours of video and 16 hours of wireless web on a 99.6 Wh battery, according to the spec list Fstoppers published. The 24 hours and 17 hours on the box belong to the 16-inch M5 Pro, as Fstoppers pointed out and as TechRadar's own spec table shows. Tom's Hardware and TechRadar both judged their M5 Max results against the M5 Pro figures.
Each battery test is a different workload, so the results cannot be averaged. Tom's Hardware, which browses the web, runs OpenGL tests and streams video at 150 nits, measured 15 hours 57 minutes. That is close to Apple's 16-hour web rating for the M5 Max, though the test mixes web, OpenGL and video, and the outlet compared it with the M5 Pro's 17 hours. Tom's Guide's continuous web-surfing test ran 21 hours 24 minutes. TechRadar, looping 1080p video at 50% brightness, measured 24 hours 21 minutes, above Apple's 22-hour video rating for this chip, though TechRadar compared it with the M5 Pro's 24-hour claim.
The rivals in the same tests fell well short. Tom's Guide measured 10 hours 35 minutes for Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA's RTX Spark and 10 hours 26 minutes for the Asus Zenbook A16 with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. TechRadar measured 11 hours 23 minutes for the Asus ProArt P16 RTX Spark. Tom's Hardware measured 13 hours 3 minutes for Dell's tandem-OLED XPS 16.
On the display, Tom's Hardware measured 542.6 nits in its SDR brightness test, below the 944 nits of the mini-LED Surface Laptop Ultra, and 1,964 nits in a 40% HDR window. Apple rates the panel at 1,000 nits sustained, a full-screen figure and so a different condition, and 2,000 nits peak. Fstoppers noted that the HDR peak scales with the SDR setting: SDR must reach 125 nits before highlights can hit 2,000.
The SSD claim held only on the larger drive. Apple promises up to 14.5 GB/s. Fstoppers measured 14,204 MB/s read and 13,650 MB/s write on a 4TB drive. TechRadar measured 12,782.7 MB/s read and 13,334.7 MB/s write on a 2TB drive.
Sustained performance split on power mode, not on the machine. In Tom's Hardware's ten-run Cinebench 2026 stress test, the default automatic mode started at 9,080 points and settled in the 8,050s as the chip throttled. In High Power Mode, which runs the fans harder, it started at 9,647 and its lowest run was 9,479. Fstoppers, testing only in High Power Mode on AC power, scored 9,543 and then 9,557 on an immediate second run. Its harder test, 18 parallel compression jobs for 40 rounds, dipped to 88.3% of the first round and recovered to 93.4%.
The outlets also differ on mini-LED against OLED. Tom's Hardware found its earlier 14-inch mini-LED M5 Max ran just shy of 18 hours on its test, longer than the new 16-inch. Tom's Guide found the 16-inch PROLED M5 Max effectively tied the 16-inch mini-LED M5 Pro, at 21 hours 24 minutes against 21 hours 31 minutes. The two compared different machines, so both findings can stand.
Fstoppers' power numbers may help explain the battery results. Using macOS's powermetrics tool, Fstoppers measured 69.6 to 71.2 W of CPU package power under an all-core load, with thermal pressure at Nominal. A single thread drew 8.5 to 8.9 W, the GPU drew 34 to 37 W in Cinebench's GPU test, and the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine together drew 72 to 170 mW at idle. These are chip readings, not what the laptop pulls from the wall. They show a chip that idles at a fraction of a watt and can hold about 70 W under load, which may be why light-use runtimes stretch so far.
For local AI, the M5 Max with the 40-core GPU moves 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth, against 460 GB/s for the 32-core version and 307 GB/s for the M5 Pro, per the specs Fstoppers listed. No review read for this piece measured tokens per second on a language model, so the machine's local-AI speed is still unmeasured.
The OLED panel costs $400 more than a mini-LED MacBook Pro with the same chip. Prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch; the 16-inch M5 Max configuration reviewed is listed at $7,399.
The measurements are mixed on Apple's battery and storage claims, with two caveats: the headline 24 hours belongs to the M5 Pro, and Tom's Hardware saw the default power mode throttle under long all-core loads, while Fstoppers tested only High Power Mode. Buyers who mainly want the display and runtime are well served. Buyers who mainly want speed get the same M5 Max as before; TechRadar says both M5 chips outperform the $1,999 M6 MacBook Pro, while Tom's Hardware notes the M6 is faster on a single core. Still unproven: local-LLM throughput, wall power under load, and the 14-inch M5 Max, which no outlet in this set reviewed.
