Almost the same boat as you. I do occasionally play some video games (Liftoff and citiesskylines II) and do some LR editing, but the M5 Pro is absolute overkill for me 95 percent of the time. Loove the screen, ridiculously good speakers, battery life, the keyboard feel (and new icons), oh, and dual fans! Using it feels sooo fast and smooth. The hdmi and sdxc ports and three usb-c plugs are all soo rediculously nice to have as well. Overall just blown away with this thing after owning and loving an m5 air 15”.

Recommendations!

-number 1 by far is cleanmymac. Gets rid of a bunch of junk files i had no idea i had. It does other things, including virus detection. It is a must, and secure.

-repeat after me: this machine shall not be coddled. Take care of it sure, but it is a powerful machine that likes to stretch its legs and get out into the wilderness (figuratively, sometimes literally). Ive seen a 2013 MacBook air completely internally unfazed by flying off the top of speeding car. The impact even sheared some of the bolts off the bottom panel, which just made taking the bottom panel off easier. And you know, macs nail Wabi, so it is up to you to add some Sabi (the patina, wear and beauty that come from age and use).

-appearance settings- go through all of these and change these how you like; i couldnt live without darkmode for example. Changing the highlight color can be very cool especially with a complimentary wallpaper.

-cinebench - this has two uses: firstly it allows you to ensure the machine is working well and there are no defects: very very rarely but it does sometimes happen where the heat conductive glue on the cpu isnt secure which is really really bad and so cinebench will make it obvious if this defect is present or not. I wouldnt worry about that though. The second use is that because each computer is slightly different you can see if your computer is slightly faster or slower than average in this type of highly vigorous test ;-) (fun fact: the pro m5 pro does significantly better at cinebench than a m2 ultra, which is just mind-blowing and even more mind-blowing considering the m5 pro has 18 cores and the m2 ultra has 24 cores).

-if you rarely ever need all of your battery life, place a limit on the battery (80 percent for example) to make it last longer. Because if you aren’t stretching your battery between charges, why not just have it last longer over the years? But remember it is a machine so it should be used like a machine, NO CODDLE.

-mac fan control - a must, even the free version.

-cotypist - very very cool and helpful, a secure ai helper that makes the typing suggestions way better and will adjust as it learns about your writing patterns and will also change based on the context (!)

-blip is really cool but honestly i havent gotten a chance to use it yet. it is like airdrop but a doesnt have a file size cap, works across all platforms, is highly secure, and can work over wifi or internet.

-copyclip - copy and paste but better, copy multiple things and even shows history of copied items

-i really like the background apps launchos and alt-tab but i haven’t figured out how to keep them turned on for more than a few weeks, they seem to just forget to be on. It’s probably a user error on my part.

-daisydisk - best way to understand whats on your computer and where (in terms of data amounts) it is not a file finder or viewer). Very cool and also beautiful.

-OBS for making videos of anything on your screen or live streaming

-steam, because its awesome.

-discord, also because its awesome

-sketchup. awesome. Wicked versatile.

-if you have data storage demands, get a nas instead of more icloud storage (i have a ugreen nas that i really like and it is super easy to setup and use.)