Apple's MacBook Air now comes with an M5 chip inside, making this already powerful machine even faster. There's a reason we rated the MacBook Air as one of the best laptops to buy. It's lightweight, thin and competitively priced. So with the new M5 version, things are only likely to improve.
This comes on the same day Apple upgraded its flagship MacBook Pro models to the new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Plus, it's nearly exactly a year since the MacBook M4 launched.
The M5 version promises 4x faster AI performance, as well as 1.5x faster ray-tracing in Blender and 1.5x faster image processing in Affinity. It's not just the processing power that has got a speed boost on this new MacBook Air, though. The on-board memory now has a rapid 153GB/s of bandwidth, and the SSD storage has 2x the read/write performance of the old model.
Talking of storage, the M5 model has doubled the base-level storage capacity to 512GB. Similar to how the new iPhone 17e doubled the storage from the 16e.
Also featured on the MacBook Air is the new Apple-designed N1 Networking chip, which enables WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6. As with the previous model, it features two Thunderbolt 4 ports for up to two external displays, and a dedicated MagSafe port for charging.
There are both 13.6-inch and 15.3-inch versions of the liquid retina display on offer, with prices starting from £1099 / $1099 – which is a £100 / $100 increase from the older model. Pre-orders start from 4 March 2026, with availability in stores and for delivery on 11 March 2026.
