In its slew of MacBook updates today, Apple also announced a surprising upgrade to its MacBook Air, which will get its new M5 chip and better performance on AI tasks.
Apple says the new MacBook Air with M5 chip comes with a “faster CPU and next-generation GPU” and has a Neural Accelerator in every core, making it better suited for AI workflows and running Apple Intelligence. On top of that, the M5 MacBook Air now starts with 512GB of storage, which is twice the starting storage of the last generation. It’s also now configurable with up to 4TB of storage. Speaking of storage, Apple says a new SSD also brings double the read/write performance of the last generation.
On the performance side, Apple says the MacBook Air M5 has a 10-core CPU, claiming the “world’s fastest CPU core” and up to a 10-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core. With that configuration, the M5 MacBook Air apparently has as much as four times faster performance for AI tasks compared to the M4 MacBook Air and is over nine times faster than the M1 MacBook Air.
While performance gets a boost, both the display and battery are the same as the M4 MacBook Air. The MacBook Air M5 comes with a 13.6-inch or 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display that has 500 nits of brightness and also has up to 18 hours of battery life.
With that performance boost also comes a price increase. The 13.6-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,100, which is $100 more than the M4 MacBook Air. The 15.3-inch MacBook Air M5 starts at $1,300. You can preorder both versions of the M5 MacBook Air starting at 9:15 a.m. ET on March 4, and Apple says laptops will start arriving on March 11.
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