- RATING
The MacBook Air with M5 is the ideal laptop for most customers with a thin and light design but plenty of power and performance under the hood to handle your tasks and AI queries. It is just right.
You can never underestimate Apple’s MacBook Air. The thin and light laptop certainly packs a punch despite its svelte dimensions and now with the latest M5 chip onboard, the MacBook Air will pleasantly surprise most customers.
Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of an inter-office envelope back in 2008 (I was in the audience that day at Macworld in San Francisco) to demonstrate the breakthrough design which made every other laptop at that time seem big and bulky.
To this day the MacBook Air is still the most popular laptop in Apple’s line-up although it will now be challenged by the recently introduced $899 MacBook Neo.
The MacBook Air now sits perfectly in the middle of the MacBook range – it offers significantly more power and possibilities than the MacBook Neo and still quite capable in its own right.
The MacBook Air with M5 is the perfect choice for the customer who wants more power at their fingertips but who doesn’t want to pay for more power with the Pro that they would rarely need.
And that fact the MacBook Air with the added speed, power and performance that the latest Apple M5 chip brings will make it an even more compelling proposition for customers and still hold its place as Apple’s highest-selling laptop.
On the design side, Apple has decided to leave it alone. It hasn’t changed since 2022.
There is not much it can change it apart from making it even thinner but then you run into engineering issues which require a certain amount of space to fit in the battery and to keep it ventilated because it is still fanless.
There are 13-inch and 15-inch models with stunning Liquid Retina displays.
Tech Guide received the 13-inch version for this review.
The MacBook Air with M5 has same excellent keyboard and trackpad with one small difference.
The labelling on some keys have changed from words to symbols.
The words tab, caps lock and shift have gone from the left side as have the words delete, return and shift down the right.
Hardly a massive change but a small difference that doesn’t change our relationship with these often-hit keys.
Under the hood is where most of the changes have been made starting with the M5 chip which has a 10-core GPU and what Apple calls the world’s fastest CPU for responsiveness – and we must agree.
The new MacBook Air with M5 is noticeably more peppy than last year’s model.
MacBook Air with M5 comes with 16GB unified memory and double the standard storage with 512GB – that’s a nice bump.
It can handle up to 32GB unified memory and up to 4TB SSD storage for the first time.
The new SSD offers two times faster read/write speeds than the previous model.
The M5 chip has also made gaming even better with better 3D rendering thanks to the
In fact it is four times faster when computing AI commands and tasks and 9.5 times faster than the MacBook Air with M1.
Here’s how the new MacBook Air with M5 has improved in speed and responsiveness:
– Up to 6.9x faster AI video enhancement performance in Topaz Video when compared to MacBook Air with M1, and up to 1.9x faster than MacBook Air with M4.
– Up to 6.5x faster 3D rendering with ray-tracing performance in Blender when compared to MacBook Air with M1, and up to 1.5x faster than MacBook Air with M4.
– Up to 2.7x faster image processing performance in Affinity when compared to MacBook Air with M1, and up to 1.5x faster than MacBook Air with M4.
– Web browsing is up to 50 per cent faster when compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core Ultra X7 processor, and more demanding tasks get up to 2x faster performance.
Another huge improvement is battery life which runs up to 18 hours – that’s six hours longer than the Intel-based MacBook Air and slightly better than last year’s model.
The 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 starts at $1,799 and the 15-inch MacBook Air with M5 starts at $2,199.
They are available now in sky blue, midnight, starlight and silver.
VERDICT
The MacBook Air with M5 is the ideal laptop for most customers with a thin and light design but plenty of power and performance under the hood to handle your tasks and AI queries. It is just right.
