Apple MacBook Air M5 13-inch

MacBook Air M5 Overview

Design and Display

It comes in the same 13-inch size as before, and the design hasn't changed at all. The MacBook Air M5 keeps the same thin, fanless aluminum body that Apple has been refining for years. The 13-inch model weighs about 2.7 pounds, and is under half an inch thick. It runs completely silently because there's no fan. Similarly, the MacBook Air comes in the same color options as last year, with sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver.

Nothing has really changed here. The 13-inch model has a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display at 2560 x 1664. It has 500 nits of brightness, P3 wide color, True Tone, and support for 1 billion colors. This model can drive up to two external displays via the Thunderbolt ports.

Performance

The M5 chip is built on third-generation 3nm technology and features a 10-core CPU, the same core count as M4, but faster. Apple claims the CPU is about 15% quicker in multi-threaded workloads. The GPU goes up to 10 cores as well, with a key new addition: a Neural Accelerator in each GPU core. That's new to M5 and is a big part of why the AI performance numbers are so much higher this generation.

Memory bandwidth goes up to 153GB/s, which is a 28% jump over M4. That affects everything from how fast apps open to how well the system handles switching between multiple heavy apps at once.

For 3D work and gaming, M5 brings a third-generation ray-tracing engine and updated shader cores. Apple claims up to 6.5x faster ray-tracing rendering in Blender compared to M1, and 1.5x faster than M4. For AI-specific tasks, the numbers are now more dramatic; we are talking up to 4x faster than M4 and up to 9.5x faster than M1 for on-device AI workloads. However, the base RAM is still 16GB, configurable up to 32GB.

Storage

Probably one of the best things to come out of the MacBook Air this year is the increased base storage. The base MacBook Air M5 comes with 512GB of storage, double the 256GB that the M4 shipped with. And it's not just more storage, as the new SSD delivers 2x faster read and write speeds compared to the previous generation. Max storage has also doubled, going from 2TB up to 4TB for the first time on the Air.

Camera and Audio

The MacBook Air M5 has a 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View. Center Stage keeps you in frame automatically during video calls, and Desk View uses the wide-angle lens to show a top-down view of your desk at the same time. The M5's Neural Engine handles the processing for both, and it's noticeably better at this than older chips.

The audio hardware and features on the MacBook Air M5 remain unchanged from the M4 model. It still uses a three-mic array for noise-reduced calls and a speaker setup that supports Spatial Audio, Dolby Atmos, and wide stereo sound. Other than that, there's a new Edge Light feature in macOS Tahoe that adds a virtual fill light effect to your camera feed during video calls.

Connectivity and Battery

The MacBook Air M5 gets Apple's N1 wireless chip, the same one that came to the iPad Air this year. That means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, up from Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 on the M4. For ports, you get two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack. MagSafe is still there for dedicated charging, so you don't have to use one of the Thunderbolt ports for power if you don't want to.

We all know how good the battery on the MacBook Air has always been. However, it's also remained unchanged just as before with up to 18 hours of battery life. You can charge this battery using MagSafe or USB-C, which gets you to 50% in about 30 minutes.

Software

The MacBook Air M5 ships with macOS Tahoe. The big design change in Tahoe is Liquid Glass, the same translucent UI material coming to iPadOS 26. Beyond the look, macOS Tahoe brings folder and icon color customization, Live Translation in Messages and FaceTime, updated Reminders with automatic action categorization, and more capable Shortcuts that can tap into Apple Intelligence models directly.

Apple Intelligence features are on board across writing, image generation, and system-level tools. iPhone Mirroring is also there, which lets you interact with your iPhone directly from the Mac screen, with Live Activities support so you can take action on notifications without picking up your phone. The Phone app on Mac lets you relay cellular calls from a nearby iPhone.