Apple MacBook Air M5 review: Apple’s thinnest laptop gets an upgrade

Thanks to the existence of the MacBook Neo, Apple’s slimmest laptop is no longer its cheapest. That puts it in a slightly awkward middle ground, as power users will naturally gravitate to the absurd heights of MacBook Pro models, such as the one with the M5 Max CPU, while the Neo is a compelling prospect for anyone looking for a cheap everyday laptop. By putting an M5 in the new MacBook Air, however, Apple has positioned it as a natural step up. There's almost as much processing power here as you’d get from the entry-level MacBook Pro, at a lower price, and while it can’t be specced with enormous amounts of RAM and storage, what you get is a useful and highly portable laptop that can handle plenty of photo and video tasks.

Specifications

Price

The 13-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099/£1,099/AU$1,799, an increase over the M4 model, and if you spec it up with a small processor upgrade, 32GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD, you’ll get to $2,699/£2,699/AU$3,999. There's a 15-inch model too, which is more expensive, but for a thin and light laptop of this quality, it’s not a bad price, especially as it comes with 16GB of RAM as standard. While you can certainly find something cheaper, what you won’t get elsewhere are the Mac’s superb battery life and quality of life improvements like the Center Stage camera.

Design & Handling

The MacBook Air is noticeably thinner than both the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, and as it no longer comes in a wedge shape, there's a strong family resemblance to the rest of the MacBook range. The one reviewed here is Sky Blue, a subtle metallic hue that’s not strongly coloured, but which is different enough from the standard silver colour to make it stand out. A golden Starlight is also available, as are plain old dark grey and silver, though the former is called Midnight. It’s not as colourful as the Neo, perhaps pointing toward a position as a more work-oriented device, but still very attractive.

Otherwise, it’s a very similar machine to MacBooks past and present. There are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a more satisfying arrangement than the Neo’s limited choice of USB-Cs, as well as a MagSafe charging port. You get a USB-C to MagSafe cable in the box, but no Mac comes with a charger anymore; they’re an optional extra as Apple assumes we have loads of chargers lying around at home. The aluminium chassis is still solid as a rock, its edges lining up precisely when the lid closes, and you get a fingerprint reader at the top right corner of the keyboard.

The M5 Air supports two external monitors alongside its built-in screen, which is an LED-backlit IPS, as Apple continues to resist the lure of OLEDs and touchscreens. It’s plenty bright and colourful enough for everyday use, and provides a large chunk of the P3 colour gamut if that’s important to you, though a 13-inch screen isn’t ideal for the kind of work that requires it, and something like the Apple Studio Display is likely to be used instead.

MacOS itself has come in for a bit of criticism following its ‘Liquid Glass’ redesign, but it’s absolutely solid and full of conveniences for the user, especially if you’re an iPhone user already. It’s an easy switch from Windows, too, if you’re thinking of picking up a Mac for the first time, and the look of almost every aspect of it can be customised if you find it too colourful.

Performance

There's a full-sized, 10-core M5 in this version of the MacBook Air, and while it’s passively cooled rather than using a fan like the MacBook Pro, its performance doesn’t suffer too much. In testing, its scores are lower than those of the entry-level Pro, but not as low as you might expect given the $600 price difference.

What the lack of active cooling does mean for the Air is that it’s best used in short bursts. Sustained heavy loads will push it to its thermal limits more quickly than they will the Pro, so a big video transcode or export may take longer. You can see this in effect in tests like Cinebench 2024, which uses all the CPU cores to render a scene: the MacBook Pro’s M5 spins up its fan and delivers 40% greater performance in this test. For most of the tasks the MacBook Air will be put to, this doesn’t matter. Its single-core performance is almost equal to that of the M5 Pro, and if you spring for the upgrade to the 10-core GPU, it can deliver almost Pro-like graphics performance, just 12% behind. Apple’s integrated graphics solution is still well behind Windows laptops with Nvidia chips in them; however, to mimic their power, you need something like the MacBook Pro with M5 Max, a much larger investment.

Still, the Air is a highly capable Photoshop machine, and it doesn’t do too badly in Premiere Pro either. It happily sits alongside the latest Core Ultra chips in terms of its video processing performance, though again, its lack of active cooling can raise its head here. Lightroom denoise relies heavily on the GPU, and can take longer on the Air than laptops with more graphics power, especially if you’re using the model with only eight GPU cores.

Verdict

The MacBook Air has always been a popular choice among travelling photographers, as its low price and slim profile make it an ideal second machine alongside a more powerful desktop Mac. With an M5 beating at its heart, the MacBook Air makes a compelling case for being the only computer you need to own: it’s certainly powerful enough, though you may like to add RAM and storage upgrades which will push the price up. What you get is slim, beautifully made, full of advanced features and capable of dealing with any task you might set it, though power users might want to look into the MacBook Pro instead, especially as the Air tops out at 32GB of RAM.