MacBook Air M5: Apple sealed the cracks, then widened the one in the price

Apple has spent five Air generations making the chip faster while leaving a few annoying holes: slow base storage, odd external-display rules, and local AI numbers that did not match the ads. The M5 closes most of those. It also costs more.

The numbers below come from Alex Ziskind's five-machine comparison (M1 through M5, all on macOS Tahoe). He bought the laptops himself. We did not rerun the benches. We did check Apple's US configure price for the 13-inch M5 16GB / 512GB: $1,299 as of August 16, 2026.

Same shell, still Thunderbolt 4

From the outside, an M5 Air is an M4 Air. Keyboard, screen, MagSafe, two ports on the left. Still Thunderbolt 4, not 5. The new radio is the N1: Wi-Fi 7 and newer Bluetooth.

Wi-Fi 7 is supposed to mean 320 MHz channels. On the Air, Apple caps that at 160 MHz. In iPerf on a 6 GHz network, Ziskind's M5 landed near the M4, even a hair behind the M3, nowhere near the brochure. If you buy this for wireless speed, you are buying a bottleneck.

Displays: two externals, one cable

M1 and M2: one external screen. M3: two, lid closed. M4: two externals plus the laptop, three total. M5 keeps that M4 setup. No third monitor with the lid shut.

The useful change is wiring. The M5 can drive both externals from a single Thunderbolt port. The M4 used both ports. On a two-port machine, that is the difference between a dock and a dongle pile.

Storage finally moved

Four years the CPU climbed and the SSD sat still. Some 256GB drives on M2/M3 were slower than a 512GB M1. The M5 sequential numbers are in another league, fast enough that an external disk became the slow one in the test. Apple also dropped the 256GB SKU and will sell up to 4TB, at Apple's usual storage tax.

That matches how we rank Airs here: 256GB is a trap unless you live in the cloud. The M5 base is 512GB. That part is the right default.

CPU: small on the web, real on a compile

• Speedometer (busy browser / Electron): M5 is about 5% over M4, the smallest jump since the M1. M1 to M5 is still about 60%.
• Single-core C++ sort: M5 about 8% over M4, about 36% faster than M1. M2 was a wash vs M1.
• llama.cpp build: M1 1:40, M2 1:22, M3 1:14, M4 1:03, M5 0:54. About 14% over M4, nearly half the M1 time.

M4 and M5 both have 10 CPU cores. The first three Airs had eight. M5 also names some of those cores "super cores." If you live in VS Code and a compiler, the compile number matters more than Speedometer.

It still gets warm

A fanless Air will throttle if you pin every core. Ziskind looped a billion-integer merge sort five times. The M5 won on wall clock (11:33 for five passes, last pass 129 seconds) and showed the biggest slowdown from pass one to pass five: about 6%. M3 and M4 were around 5%. The M2 was slower than the M1 overall, with the smallest drift.

Palm rest: M5 a tad warmer than last year's already-warm M4. M1 still the coolest. None of that makes the M5 slow. It does mean a long compile is not a MacBook Pro with fans.

Local AI: generation vs time-to-first-token

STREAM copy: M5 about 142 GB/s vs M4 about 113 GB/s, roughly the 26% to 28% bandwidth Apple claimed, and the biggest Air bandwidth step since the M1. Token generation on a small 4-bit MLX model followed that curve: about 19 tok/s on M1 up to 44 on M5.

Prefill did not. Prompt processing went 135 to 150 to 255 to 284 tok/s from M1 to M4, then 1,061 on M5. That is about 3.7x the M4, in line with Apple's "up to 4x" GPU Neural Accelerator claim. Each M5 GPU core has one of those units. Decode still tracks memory bandwidth. Time-to-first-token on a fat coding prompt tracks the accelerators.

That is why scoring still cares about GPU Neural Accelerators and bandwidth separately, and why we do not treat the 16-core Neural Engine as a floor.

The $200

M4 Air launched at $999 with 16GB and 256GB. M5 launched at $1,099 with 16GB and 512GB: a hundred dollars for twice the disk, a much faster SSD, and the AI hardware. Then Apple raised Mac prices. The 13-inch M5 16/512 is $1,299 on the US store now. Apple blames RAM going into data centers. Maybe that eases. Maybe this is the new floor.

The machine is better. The deal is worse than the launch window. If you do not need the prefill jump, last year's M4, especially certified refurb, is the comparison that matters, not the M1.

Who this is for

• Already on an M4 Air: keep it. Faster SSD and neural accelerators are not a reason to throw the laptop out.
• On M1, M2, or M3 and short on RAM, disk, or displays: the M5 is the first Air that feels finished for two externals, 512GB, and local models.
• Ordinary web and app work with enough memory already: the M1 is still a usable Tahoe machine in 2026. That is the embarrassing compliment.

Apple spent five years sealing cracks. On the M5 they are almost done, except the one in the price, which they made a little wider.