M5 MacBook Air Hands-On: All of the Changes Are Under the Hood

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There’s not much to say about the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs with M5 chips. At Apple’s New York City experience, where it announced the $600 13-inch MacBook Neo, I got some brief hands-on time with the latest Airs and… yeah, they’re the same premium laptops you know and love—only faster. Hardware-wise, the new M5 MacBook Airs look identical to the M4 models, right down to the four colors they’re available in (sky blue, silver, starlight, and midnight). You still get the same two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports, MagSafe charging port, and 3.5mm headphone jack. The aluminum clamshell design was introduced in 2022 with the M2 MacBook Air and is tried and true at this point. There’s no need to change it just for the sake of change. All of the important changes are internal. The entry-level SSD storage for both the 13- and 15-inch models is now double what it was previously—512GB instead of 256GB. And you can max that out to 4TB for the first time. Apple also says the SSD read and write speeds are twice as fast. By my calculations, that should be somewhere around 4 to 7GB/s. For professionals like photographers and video creators always moving big files around, that’s gonna shave off a good amount of transfer times in the long run. Both models start with 16GB of RAM and can be configured with up to 32GB. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Performance is also faster than before. The M5 chip in the 13-inch MacBook Air comes with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU. The 15-inch MacBook Air has the same 10-core CPU and has two additional GPU cores for a total of 10. We’ve already seen the power of the M5 chip from the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro released last October; the CPU is up to 20% faster and the GPU is up to 40% faster compared to the M4 chip. Those performance gains might be a little lower on the M5 MacBook Airs, considering they’re fanless and therefore could throttle sooner compared to the M5 MacBook Pro, which has a single fan. Where you’ll probably see a more meaningful performance bump is for AI workloads. I didn’t get to try out any AI apps, but Apple claims the M5 chip in the new MacBook Airs can process large language model (LLM) prompts up to 4x faster than on the M4 MacBook Air, up to 9.5x faster than on the M1 MacBook Air, and up to 3.8x faster than a Windows laptop with an Intel Core Ultra X7 CPU. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo And that’s really it. I have a long wish list of things that I would love to see Apple change on the MacBook Airs. Everything from shaving some weight to improving the webcam quality to increasing the brightness of the screen or adding a faster refresh rate, but I guess those will have to wait for a future hardware design refresh. Even some fresh new colors would have been appreciated. For now, the M5 MacBook Air plays it safe with solid hardware and faster performance. The $100 price hike from $1,000 for the M4 MacBook Air to $1,100 stings at first, but since you’re getting twice the storage, it’s actually a steal considering it used to cost $200 to double it.