For $100 more at the low-end, Apple's most popular laptop, the MacBook Air, just got a spec bump to M5, double the starting storage and upgraded wireless connectivity.
The New MacBook Air comes in two sizes, either 13.6 inches or 15.3 inches. It boasts a Liquid Retina display, 500 nits of brightness, and support for 1 billion colors.
The biggest update, of course, is the M5 chip. The MacBook Air features a 10-core CPU and an up-to-10-core GPU, with a powerful Neural Accelerator in each core.
M5 MacBook Air
"The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world's most popular laptop," said John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.
MacBook Air now comes standard with 512GB of storage and a new SSD that delivers 2x faster read/write performance
"With M5, MacBook Air powers through a wide range of tasks, from everyday productivity to creative workloads, and is even faster for AI," Ternus added.
Apple says that the MacBook Air with M5 delivers up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than MacBook Air with M4. It also notes that it's up to 9.5x faster than MacBook Air with M1.
Enhanced shader cores and a third-gen ray-tracing engine enable 1.9x faster performance in Topaz Video than MacBook Air with M4. Blender is said to be 1.5x faster on a M5-equipped MacBook Air than one with an M4 chip.
The M5 MacBook Air features all-day battery life
It still boasts the same all-day battery life — up to 18 hours. New to the MacBook Air are both the N1 Apple-designed networking chip, which enables both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
The M5 MacBook Air also gets a beefier starting storage. The base model comes with 512GB of storage — double that of the M4 — and can be maxed out to 4TB. The new SSD is also twice as fast as the previous generation.
It is worth noting that the new MacBook Air features two Thunderbolt 4 ports, rather than Thunderbolt 5 on the MacBook Pro. It still supports connecting two external displays.
And as always, the MacBook Air does not have a fan for active cooling. Users with sustained on-the-go processing needs should buy a MacBook Pro.
The MacBook Air starts at $1099 for a 13-inch model with base specs, and comes in Sky Blue, Starlight, Silver, or Midnight. Like most of Apple's gear, this number can jump significantly, peaking at just under $3,000 for a 15-inch model with max specs.
Preorders start Wednesday, March 4. Availability will begin on Wednesday, March 11.
