M5 MacBook Air Review: Not just more of the same—the same, but more

The M5 MacBook Air gets in on the fruit fun.

With the M5 generation, the MacBook Air finds itself in an unfamiliar, though not unprecedented, position: that of the middle sibling.

Previously Apple’s most affordable laptop, the Air has been undercut in that department by the new MacBook Neo, social media darling and—if you’ll pardon the expression—apple of its parents’ eye. Not since the polycarbonate MacBook’s retirement in 2011 has there been a notebook in Apple’s lineup with a lower price point than the MacBook Air, and it’s gotten used to that status, which led it to its long-running and, for the moment still undisputed, title as Apple’s best-selling Mac.

But with the eye-catching Neo now substantially undercutting the Air’s base price (itself now slightly higher than previously), and the MacBook Pro family bringing unmatched performance, what’s the MacBook Air’s role in the modern Mac lineup? Though it might seem like this the Air is on the brink of an identity crisis, the truth is that, in the way of middle children since time immemorial, the truth is simple: the MacBook Air is all about getting its job done without fanfare.

Performance, no anxiety

Though it may not boast the sheer power of the MacBook Pro, the Air, like the rest of its M5 siblings, does feature those newly rechristened “super” cores, of which it features four, in addition to six efficiency cores (none of those newfangled “performance” cores like the M5 MacBook Pro). There’s also the 16-core Neural Engine, as well as either 8- or 10- of the improved GPU cores with their Neural Accelerators.

Of course, we’ve had an idea of the ballpark of M5 performance since last fall’s first slew of products using the latest chip generation, and there’s little surprising here: just the usual generation-over-generation bump, in this case of about 11 percent in both single and multicore performance over the M4 Air. GPU saw more measurable improvement in the M5 Air, with about 31 percent better performance on average. In keeping with previous generations, the MacBook Pros, with their active cooling systems, eke a bit more performance out of those individual cores—but just a bit.

As ever, there’s little reason to upgrade from the immediately previous models—the difference between the M4 and M5 is negligible for most users. But those small improvements do add up: go back to the M3, M2, M1, and you’re talking jumps in the 38 percent, 57 percent, and 75 percent range for single-core performance. I only just replaced an M1 Air with an M4 model last year1, and it’s a testament to Apple’s engineering how good that first generation of Apple silicon still is, almost six years later.

Memory options are constant with the previous generation, starting at 16GB standard, with options for 24GB or 32GB on the 10-core GPU models. However, memory bandwidth is up to 153GB/s, a bump from the 120GB/s on the M4 Air, even if it’s only half the bandwidth of the higher-end MacBook Pro models.

One place you will find a noticeable bump is in storage. The Air now starts at 512GB of SSD storage, double that of its predecessor, and offers up to 4TB, the same maximum as all but the M5 Max-configured MacBook Pros. That capacity increase comes with a speed improvement as well: Apple says the new SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation and my tests concur. Compared to my personal M4 MacBook Air, the M5 registered read speed improvements of 125 percent, and an extraordinary 219 percent improvement in write speed, according to Blackmagic’s disk tests. So impressive were those numbers, I ran AmorphousDiskMark as a comparison and came away with somewhat lesser, but still outstanding gains up to 139 percent.

Apple’s claim that the M5’s SSD speeds (right) are up to twice that of the M4’s SSD is, if anything, underselling the matter.

I ran an informal test copying a 29GB Final Cut Pro project from an external SSD to both machines, and the M5 was about 30 percent faster. It picked up a more meager 13 percent improvement in compressing that same project, though there are other factors at play there beyond sheer disk speeds. In short, your disk speed is probably not going to be your performance bottleneck here.

Apple’s also updated the wireless in this model via its in-house N1 chip, which first debuted last fall across several product lines. That means support for Wi-Fi 7 (aka 802.11be) and Bluetooth 6, neither of which I have an easy method to test, given my downright decrepit Wi-Fi 6 home network, but it’s perhaps more significant in that we will surely see N2 and N3 chips down the line, ensuring prompt and efficient support for the latest and greatest wireless technologies. And since, as with the M and A series chips, this is Apple’s own effort, the company’s penchant for control comes with a promise to make networking ever more integrated and power efficient.

Still lacking in any of Apple’s laptops, however, are cellular options, all the more apparent as the company touts its C1X modem in recently released iPhones and iPads. Might that finally find its way into a future MacBook? Maybe, but it’s not happening here.

The devil’s in the details

So much is the same with the M5 MacBook Air—the screen, the ports, the webcam, the mic and speakers, the very form factor itself—that it’s all the more significant when this year’s model does deviate from its predecessor. Two small examples caught my attention this time around.

The first, which surprised me, is the keyboard. Gone, in this generation (including the new MacBook Pros), are several keys’ text labels: tab, caps lock, return, shift, and delete. In each case, they’ve been replaced by glyphs, of the same kind long used for keyboard shortcuts in drop-down menus.

The MacBook Air’s U.S. keyboard layout joins the rest of the world’s in using glyphs instead of text labels on several common keys.

If you’re sitting there thinking “Wait, what do you mean—it’s been that way forever?” then congratulations, you’re probably outside the United States. The U.S. has remained an outlier even as the rest of Apple’s international keyboard layouts use this near universally agreed-upon standard.2 This standardizes this style across Apple’s laptops (and probably soon its standalone keyboards as well), while also bringing them into line with iOS and iPadOS keyboards, which now use the same symbols (and, in some cases, have for a very long time). Labels are not totally gone, though: the Air’s keyboard still sports text on the function, control, option, and command keyboards, alongside their long-used symbols.

Holy missing holes, Batman!

The second thing that I noticed was that Apple is now shipping a new power adapter with the M5 Air. Previously, the company included either a 30W adapter for the base model or a 35W adapter with 2 USB-C ports. With this model, we’re back to a single port “Dynamic Power Adapter” that is rated for 40W with a maximum of 60W. It’s a little smaller than the old dual port design—and, interestingly, lacks the standard holes on the prongs that you find on most plugs, which can add some degree of stability to the connection—but can handle fast charging with the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and Air, as well as the 11-inch and 13-inch M5 iPad Pro models. Honestly, I’ll miss the convenience of the second USB-C port, though that adapter model is still available for purchase separately from Apple.

Air to the empire

Like the M4, the M3, the M2, and even the M1 before it, the MacBook Air remains what it’s long been—even going back to the days before Apple silicon: the best Mac for most people.

Once upon a time, the MacBook Air may have been the newest and flashiest of Apple’s laptops, whether it was being plucked from a manila envelope on stage or compared to the thickness of a pencil. But nothing stays new and flashy forever.3 After 18 years, the Air isn’t a kid anymore, and that’s okay. Squeezing between the Neo and the Pro means there’s room for the Air to chart its own course. The pressure of being the cheapest MacBook is off—all too clearly, given the $1099 base price in this generation. Apple may very well try to get that back under a thousand in the future, but for now it’s okay, because if price is your main factor, you now have a far better option.

The Air remains a truly great Mac. Those who butt up against the limitations of the Neo will be more than comfortable here: after all, it’s unquestionably better than the Neo in pretty much every way—with the exception of its color options. There’s a clear value proposition with the Air: pay more to get more. And that higher cost is reasonable for what you get, especially when you compare the starting prices of the MacBook Pro.

The Neo may vie for the title of Apple’s bestselling Mac, but it’s got its work cut out for it: the crown remains the MacBook Air’s to lose and if you come at the king, you better not miss.

Updated on March 10 at 4:37pm Eastern: An earlier version of this article had incorrect percentages for the performance gains in the SSD tests.

And honestly, only then because I’d run out of disk space. I handed it over to my dad and it meets his needs nicely. ↩

Impossible. ↩

Woof, tell me about it. ↩