MacBook Air M5: The Definitive Buyer’s Guide

With me are the new MacBook Airs with

M5. Now, I've been using the 13-in as my

daily driver, probably for the last two

weeks or so, and guys, it really caught

me by surprise. I have to say, I

absolutely love it. The Air is just the

sweet spot. It is the laptop that most

people should buy. It really does just

get the basics right. It's very

portable. It's got plenty of performance

for light use. Everything's going to

feel very snappy on it. You can even run

professional apps so long as the

projects you're working on are simple.

And in a world where Windows laptops are

just going up in price, it's awesome

that the Airs really haven't. So, in

2026, the Air, it just brings tremendous

value to the table. Compared to the Neo

and Air is a much safer buy. Compared to

Windows laptops, they still can't get it

right. Sure, they may have bells and

whistles that the Air doesn't, like an

OLED screen, but they also have a lot of

cons that as a whole just makes them

worse. Take Dell's XPS14. It would have

destroyed this laptop if it didn't have

a crap keyboard and cost an arm and a

leg. At least for the config we

recommend with the XJ chip and a tandem

OLED screen. That being said, I would

avoid specking up the Air to try and

make it something it isn't. There's just

a limit to the Air's performance, and

adding more memory, it may not help.

Apple's upgrades are also very

expensive, and they significantly reduce

the laptop's main selling point, which

is its incredible value. With that said,

here's my review. But first, a very

quick thank you to Best Buy who helped

us get these in. Folks, we spent tens of

thousands of dollars this year buying

pretty much every MacBook and every

configuration of MacBook for our

reviews, and we've got a lot of content

coming. So, it was really nice that Best

Buy helped out here. All right, since

the M5 chip is basically the main thing

that's new here, I'm going to start with

Geekbench. It pretty much tests a bunch

of common performance tasks. It doesn't

push the laptop to its limits though,

which is why in this test, the Air with

the M5 performs around the same as the

MacBook Pro 14, also with the M5.

Compared to last year's MacBook Air with

M4, this new one it's around 13 to 15%

faster. So, a modest bump up. If you are

upgrading from an older Air with M1 or

M2, the bump though, it is really

significant. It's around twice the

multi-core performance. If you're open

to what Windows has to offer, Intel's

new Panther Lake H chips, they do trade

blows with M5. In this test, their

multi-core performance, it is similar.

However, Apple still wins in single

core. But those Panther Lake H chips,

they're often found in more expensive

laptops. You see, Apple's MacBook Airs,

they cover a large price range that does

include some of those, but it also

includes plenty of the lower-end non-Hel

chips. So, we've added two versions of

Dell's XPS here with each of those

chips. You can see that the M5 chip, it

smashes that non-Hb Intel chip. Okay,

moving on to Cinebench, which maxes out

the laptop's performance. There are a

couple of big takeaways here. Firstly,

the MacBook Air with M5 is not that much

faster than the Air with M4, at least

again, not in this test. The MacBook Pro

14 with the M5 chip, it does beat the

Air by around 25%. It has the same

number of CPU cores, which is what this

test tests. Now, the reason for this

difference is because the Pro has a fan

to call its processor. This means it can

feed it more power for longer. It feeds

it an average of 26 watts, whereas the

Air averages at 12 W. That being said,

there are huge diminishing marginal

returns of doing this. The CPU just

becomes far less efficient. You're

essentially feeding it 117% more power

for 25% more performance. Not worth.

Back on Cinebench for sustained high

performance loads, Intel and AMD's

performance chips, they do have an edge

over M5. That's in overall multi-core

performance, not single core. Now, as I

said, the Air straddles the price of

Windows laptops with these chips and

less powerful ones. If you are comparing

the base Air to a nonH Intel chip, one

with eight cores, not 16, the Air just

smashes it. In terms of power efficiency

in this test, the M5 chip when in the

air, it is significantly more power

efficient than what Intel and AMD have

on offer. Now, if you think getting the

M5 chip in the larger 15-in Air would

mean it would perform better because it

has a larger surface area to cool the

processor, well, you'd be wrong. It's a

rounding error when it comes to the

difference. And if you're considering

the Neo, you can see how poor its max

CPU performance is. If you're coming

from any MacBook Air with the M3 chip

onwards, it's a major jump up in

performance from the Neo. All right. If

you plan to use the Air for some

creative work, it's definitely capable,

but not for everything. It really

depends on what you're doing. In

Photoshop, it performs very well. It

even beats out the Legion 7A, which is a

gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU. It

also smashes Intel's Panther Lake X

chip. Those are the ones with a more

powerful B390 integrated GPU. Now, in

this test, all that extra power fed to

the M5 chip when it's placed in the

MacBook Pro 14, it doesn't really result

in any extra performance. Moving over to

video editing, we ran the new Puget

benchmark. Here you can really see how

much better a laptop with an Nvidia GPU

performs. By the way, the reason we've

chosen this particular Legion to show is

that it's quite compact for a gaming

laptop. It's also premium like the airs

and we feel it's going to be priced

similar to the higher spec airs. Now

Premier Pro, it also demonstrates that

there is a benefit of moving up from the

M58 core GPU that comes in the base

13-in air to the M510 core GPU that's

available in the 13-in airs as an

upgrade and it also comes in all of the

15 in. Now, at least it's a benefit in

some apps. Compared to the prior M4

airs, you can really see a big jump in

performance here. our MacBook Air with

the M58 core GPU beat out our older Air

with the M410 core GPU. So clearly

Apple's new GPU cores are much improved.

Since Premier Pro saw such a big

improvement genon on genen, I actually

wanted to see could I edit one of our

videos on the airs. So I loaded up one

of our recent ones and tried playing

back 1 minute from the timeline. I

performed that exact same test on each

of our MacBooks. On the air, playback

was unfortunately very stuttery. I

measured over 400 frames dropped at full

resolution. However, when I dropped that

playback down to half resolution, it

actually dropped only 19 frames. That

being said, this was a simpler section

of our timeline. So, I personally I

wouldn't feel comfortable moving over to

an Air. Now, if you step up to a MacBook

Pro with the M5 chip, it actually

doesn't solve this. In fact, it

performed a tad worse, which goes to

show the fan doesn't always help. It

really depends what you're doing. For

our videos, you have to move up to a

MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip to be

comfortable. By the way, you may think

the reason our MacBook Pro and the Air

did badly here is because they only have

16 gig of memory, whereas the M5 Pro

MacBook Pro, it has 24 gig. We don't

think this is the case. You see, we've

had an identical MacBook Pro with M5 in

before with 24 gig. Although, we didn't

try this specific test back then. It's a

new test for us. We did try an export of

one of our videos, which is very

intensive, more so than what we're

showing you here. We saw no benefit

moving from 16 gig to 24. Now, obviously

that's a different test. If you think

that we need to go buy a 24 gig MacBook