In a third announcement today, Apple revealed the M5 MacBook Air. The design and colors of the new Air remain the same, but its capabilities have been enhanced with the M5 chipset and other updates to the hardware.
John Ternus hits the highlights in Apple’s press release:
The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world’s most popular laptop. With M5, MacBook Air powers through a wide range of tasks, from everyday productivity to creative workloads, and is even faster for AI. Now featuring double the starting storage, as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, in a sleek and durable design with long battery life, MacBook Air is the perfect laptop for anyone who values the unrivaled combination of performance and portability.
Apple says that the M5 Air can perform AI tasks up to four times faster than the M4 model and up to 9.5 times faster than the M1 Air. That’s thanks to the M5, which features 10 CPU cores and up to 10 GPU cores with Neural Accelerators.
But there are other hardware changes that boost the Air’s performance as well. Its unified memory is now 153GB/s, a 28% improvement over the M4 model. SSD storage is two times faster, starts at 512GB (double the M4 model), and can be configured up to 4TB, the most ever for the Air. Apple’s N1 chip means users will enjoy Wi-Fi 7 speeds and Bluetooth 6, too. Also, Apple rates the M5 Air’s battery life at over 18 hours.
Sadly, the M5 MacBook Air remains a Thunderbolt 4 laptop with two ports available and support for running two external displays. While I would have liked to see the Air add Thunderbolt 5 support, the practical circumstances where I’ve wanted Thunderbolt 5 over 4 are few, so the limitation is understandable.
It’s telling that for both the M5 Air and M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros, Apple is comparing performance against the M4 models as well as earlier laptops. Even just one generation on from the M4, the M5’s gains are impressive. Of course, most users will be upgrading from an even earlier model, where the differences are more pronounced.
The M5 MacBook Air comes in sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver. The starting price for the 13” model is $1,099, and the 15” model is $1,299, with educational buyers paying starting prices that are $100 less for each. The MacBook Air will be available for pre-order tomorrow, March 4, with deliveries and in-store availability starting March 11.
