Apple unveils MacBook Air M5, faster and with double the storage
Apple has officially rolled out its latest generation in the Air family, the MacBook Air M5, in 13-inch and 15-inch variants, globally on Tuesday 4 March 2026, U.S. time. The laptops are powered by the M5 chip, designed specifically to make the MacBook Air series more reliable in handling intensive AI tasks, claiming four times faster performance than the M4 chip in the prior generation. ‘With the M5, the MacBook Air has the power to handle a range of tasks, be productive daily, and produce creative work more quickly,’ said Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus. In addition, other standout features of the MacBook Air M5 include an option for double storage, a sleeker and tougher chassis, and more consistent connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth).
The M5 itself has 10 CPU cores and is claimed to be significantly more responsive than the prior generation. The performance is paired with 10 GPU cores and a Neural Accelerator that is 4x faster than the M4 and 9.5x faster than the M1. As a laptop that is now more focused on running AI technologies, Apple claims the MacBook Air M5 comes with new AI features from Apple Intelligence across apps. The enhancements emphasise on AI computing in delivering faster rendering of 3D models, running AI agent networks, and on-device LLMs in enterprise environments, among other things.
In internal Apple testing, the MacBook Air M5 can render ray-traced scenes 6.5x faster in Blender, 2.7x faster at image processing in Affinity, and web browsing is 50% faster than on Apple devices based on Intel. The MacBook Air M5 now introduces storage that is twice as large as the previous generation. In this version, internal storage starts at 512 GB from 256 GB previously. Apple is also for the first time offering storage up to 4 TB configurable. With the expanded storage, users can produce more or run larger projects and games without worrying about storage constraints. The SSD-based storage is also claimed to read files more significantly, offering a smoother workflow, particularly for creators or students running AI workloads or transferring large data files. The MacBook Air M5 comes with a Liquid Retina display in two sizes: 13.6 inches and 15.3 inches. Brightness is 500 nits and it supports one billion colours, allowing visuals to appear sharper and richer.