Apple announces the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air with the M5 chip, bringing substantial improvements in both graphics and machine learning performance. With Neural Accelerators in every GPU core, the MacBook Air is an even more capable powerhouse.
The MacBook Air with M5 brings substantial performance improvements with up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than its M4-based predecessor, and up to 9.5x faster than the M1 MacBook Air. The 13-inch MacBook Air comes with the M5 chip with a 10-core CPU and an 8-core GPU by default, but it can be configured with the full-fledged M5 chip with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. The larger 15-inch model comes with the full-fledged M5 chip (10-core GPU) by default.
Additionally, just like with the higher-end MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the new MacBook Air now adopts Apple’s own N1 wireless networking chip that we saw for the iPhone 17 lineup, the iPhone Air, the M5 iPad Pro, and the just-announced M4 iPad Air for improved connectivity with faster Wi-Fi 7 speeds, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support.
The MacBook Air continues to feature the same brilliant display as before for both sizes. With up to 500 nits and support for 1 billion colors, customers will enjoy using the MacBook Air for everyday tasks. Thanks to the improved energy efficiency of the M5 chips, the MacBook Air still provides stupendous all-day battery life with up to 18 hours on a single charge. The color options continue to be the same as its predecessor, including the newer Sky Blue color. Just like with the M4 models, the MacBook Air continues to feature the same 12MP Center Stage camera, a three-mic array, a great sound system, MagSafe 3, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports to connect to up to two external monitors regardless of the lid situation, including the just-introduced Studio Display models.
Surprisingly, both the 13-inch and the 15-inch MacBook Air now start with double the base storage at 512GB, and there’s now a new 4TB storage option for you to store even more important files on hand, as well as all the apps from Apple Creator Studio.
The 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099 ($999 for educators), and the 15-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,299 ($1,199 for educators). That’s $100 less than before if you upgrade the MacBook Air to 512GB of storage.
Pre-orders for the M5 MacBook Air begin at 6:15 a.m. PST on Wednesday, March 4, and it will be available to customers and in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers starting Wednesday, March 11.
