Apple Announces MacBook Air With M5 Chip and 512GB Base Storage
Apple today announced refreshed MacBook Air models featuring the M5 chip and a higher base SSD capacity.
The M5 chip in the MacBook Air features a 10-core CPU, with what Apple calls the world's fastest CPU cores. It offers configurations with up to 10 GPU cores with Neural Accelerators in each core, delivering up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than the MacBook Air with the M4 chip.
The chip also has enhanced shader cores and a third-generation ray-tracing engine, along with faster unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth, which is a 28% improvement over the M4.
In addition to the M5 chip, the MacBook Air now contains Apple's custom N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity.
The MacBook Air now starts with 512GB of storage and continues to be configurable up to 4TB. The SSD also has 2x faster read and write performance compared to the previous generation.
The new MacBook Air is available for pre-order starting on Wednesday, March 4, with launch taking place on Wednesday, March 11. It starts at $1,099, $100 more than the previous generation.
Popular Stories
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has high expectations for Apple's first foldable iPhone.
In his Power On newsletter today, he said the foldable iPhone will be "the most significant overhaul in the iPhone's history."
"iPhone 4, iPhone 6 and iPhone X were clearly a big deal, but this is a whole new design," he said.
Like Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7, the foldable iPhone will reportedly open up like ...
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for more than five more months, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...
Apple offers the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max in just three colors – Silver, Cosmic Orange, and Deep Blue – but notably there's no black option. Last year was the first time Apple's high-end iPhones have not been available with a black or dark gray color option in any way, but those hoping for the return of black this year for the iPhone 18 Pro should look away now....
Popular Stories
We now know how much faster the new MacBook Air with the M5 chip is compared to the previous model with an M4 chip, courtesy of a Geekbench 6 result shared by TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff. However, given the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro were already updated with the M5 chip last year, the result is not too surprising.
Ulanoff ran Geekbench on a MacBook Air with an M5 chip, which has a...
The new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models feature a keyboard change that was easy to miss during Apple's announcements last week.
The new U.S. English keyboard layout
On the U.S. English version of the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps now have glyphs on them. On previous-generation models, these keys are labeled with text...
Apple is planning to launch a MacBook Air with an OLED display, but it won't come for several years after the MacBook Pro is updated with OLED screen technology.
We're not going to see an OLED MacBook Air until at least 2028, according to Bloomberg. Large, high-quality OLED displays are expensive, and it will take some time for the technology to come down in price enough that it can be used...
