Apple on Tuesday introduced a new MacBook Air powered by its M5 chip, promising faster performance, expanded artificial intelligence capabilities and double the starting storage, as the company continues to push its custom silicon across its product lineup.
The new MacBook Air features a 10-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU, with a Neural Accelerator embedded in each GPU core to speed up AI workloads. Apple said the laptop delivers up to four times faster AI performance than the previous M4-based model and up to 9.5 times faster than versions powered by the original M1 chip.
Apple also doubled the base storage to 512GB, up from 256GB previously, and said customers can now configure the MacBook Air with up to 4TB of storage for the first time. The company said the updated SSD offers up to twice the read and write speeds of the prior generation.
Connectivity upgrades include Apple’s new N1 wireless chip, which enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. The MacBook Air retains its fanless aluminum design and comes with a Liquid Retina display, a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, up to 18 hours of battery life, and support for up to two external displays via Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Apple said the M5 chip also improves graphics-intensive tasks such as gaming and 3D rendering through enhanced shader cores and a third-generation ray-tracing engine. Unified memory bandwidth has increased to 153GB per second, a 28% improvement over the M4 chip, according to the company.
“The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world’s most popular laptop,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.
The MacBook Air runs macOS Tahoe, Apple’s latest operating system, which introduces new design features and deeper integration of Apple Intelligence, including AI-powered shortcuts, live translation in Messages and improved task organization in Reminders.
Apple said the new MacBook Air is made with 55% recycled content and aligns with its goal of becoming carbon neutral across its entire footprint by 2030.
The MacBook Air with M5 will be available in 13-inch and 15-inch models in sky blue, midnight, starlight and silver. Pre-orders begin March 4, with devices reaching stores on March 11. The 13-inch model starts at $1,099 in the United States, while the 15-inch version starts at $1,299. Education pricing starts at $999 and $1,199 respectively.