FYI, I started my Mac journey 4 years ago with a m1 MacBook but stayed with my I9 13900k until this year (I’ve been a PC man my whole life). I recently found. a good deal on a basic 14" MacBook M5 (10 cpu cores) and 32gb of ram. It ran unbelievably well and in all tasks was better than my PC so I hunkered down and learned the Mac OS (26.6). Then I had the opportunity to try a 16" MacBook with the Pro chip (18 cpu cores) and 48gb of ram only to find it was more sluggish and not as efficient as my 14". Granted my projects are relatively small, 40-50 audio tracks, 10-20 VSTis and 8 fx channels, but I was quite suprised with my result as I was expecting a big improvement with 18 cores vs 10. Not a scientific test but a real world one for me and needless to say I’m keeping my beautiful 14:" MacBook M5 Pro!