An exciting new MacBook is rumored to be announced in just one week. If the reports end up being true, it’ll be the most significant change to the lineup in many years, introducing a touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro. As exciting as it sounds, however, it’s also the perfect opportunity to buy up the previous generation’s M5 Max MacBook Pro at its lowest price ever.
That’s especially significant considering the entire lineup got a price increase back in June. Right now, the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro with 36 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage is $3,499, which is 20 percent off the retail price and $400 cheaper than it was just a few days ago. And historically, this is $150 cheaper than this configuration has ever sold for.
This absolutely stacked version of the MacBook Pro is one of the most powerful laptops you can buy. The M5 Max is a huge upgrade over both the M4 Max and the M5 Pro, offering GPU performance we’ve never seen on a MacBook before. For content creators, media professionals, engineers, and AI enthusiasts, this is nearly as good as it gets. It can even play AAA games smoother than any Mac (outside of the new Mac Studio). In my testing, Cyberpunk 2077 could average over 60 frame per second on the Ultra preset without relying on upscaling.
If you really want to get serious about AI performance, you’ll want to upgrade to the 64-GB or 128-GB configurations—though third-party retailers like Amazon don’t sell them. You’ll have to buy directly from Apple for that, and the prices are exorbitant. But the 36-GB model that’s on sale has plenty of juice for dipping your toe in the world of on-device AI, and it’s a home run for video editors, designers, musicians, and engineers.
Beyond performance, it goes without saying that all MacBook Pros have the best speakers, displays, build quality, trackpads, and keyboards of just about any laptop. I test dozens of new laptops every year, and while some have come close (such as the Surface Laptop Ultra I just finished testing), none have taken the crown.
You might be wondering if waiting to see these new MacBooks next week is worth it. Maybe. I can’t guarantee that this deal will stick around, and I don’t know what these new MacBooks will be like. Rumors say that they will sport the same chip options as the current MacBook Pros, meaning we’d get an M5 Pro and M5 Max once again. So if you’re mostly interested in the performance, you can save some serious cash by snagging this M5 Max deal.
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