M5 MacBook Air Review (13-Inch, 2026): Go Big or Go Neo

8 / 10

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M5 MacBook Air (13-inch, 2026)

$1,099 at Apple

Pros

• Storage minimum raised to 512GB
• Thin, light and rigid aluminum design
• Improved app, graphics and AI performance from M5 chip

Cons

• Costs $500 more than MacBook Neo
• Display isn’t much bigger than the Neo’s
• Same design since 2022

The MacBook Air has lost its spot as Apple’s entry-level laptop. And, on top of that, its price has gone up $100. Built around Apple’s latest M-series processor, the M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099. That’s a full $500 more than the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new option for budget-conscious laptop shoppers. While the Air itself isn’t in danger of getting squeezed in the middle — the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro is $600 more than the baseline Air — it’s the space between the MacBook Neo and the larger, 15-inch MacBook Air that’s crowding out the 13-inch Air.

With the 13-inch Air no longer the MacBook entry point, who is it for? The much cheaper Neo is now my pick for most students (and parents making the tech purchases for their kids). The 13-inch Air is still a fantastic pick for a small, higher-performance laptop (just not Pro-level performance) and the better choice for a subset of students, such as those studying design or STEM, for example, than the Neo, but it’s not the MacBook Air I’d recommend for most.

The larger 15-inch MacBook Air offers a better balance between screen size and system weight than the 13-inch model. If you’re already spending an additional $500 to step up from the Neo to the 13-inch Air, I strongly suggest spending an additional $200 for the roomier 15-inch Air. The larger display is really nice, and the 15-inch Air is still $400 less and a few ounces lighter than the smaller 14-inch MacBook Pro, putting it in the sweet spot of productivity, portability and price.

The 15-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099, which is $100 more than the starting price of the previous M4 model. But for the most part, it’s a better deal because Apple has raised the base storage to 512GB. Goodbye, undersized 256GB SSD! Considering that Apple charged $200 to double the storage on the M4 Air, the M5 Air is $100 less than what you would have paid last year for a MacBook Air with a 512GB SSD. Memory stays at 16GB for the baseline model, and design and display remain unchanged, too.

With 10 CPU cores and either eight or 10 GPU cores, the M5 chip has the same core count as the M4. The baseline model features the eight-core GPU, and if you choose to upgrade the memory or storage (those start at $200 each), you’re automatically upgraded to the 10-core GPU. You can also upgrade to the 10-core GPU on its own for $100.

The number of cores didn’t change with the M5, but the chip introduces a new GPU architecture that puts a neural accelerator on each core to boost AI and ray-tracing performance. The M5 chip also supports faster unified memory — 153GBps of bandwidth compared to 120GBps on the M4. And the M5 Air features faster SSDs that Apple says offer twice the read and write speeds of the previous M4 model.

The M5 Air also offers improved networking. It incorporates Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Apple sent me the 1TB version of the M5 Air that costs $1,299. The M5 MacBook Air 15 starts at 1,099 in the UK and AU$1,799 in Australia.

M5 MacBook Air performance

The M5 Air adds generation-over-generation performance gains, with the M5 model outpacing the previous M4 Air on both the single- and multicore tests of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. Its scores were well ahead of the MacBook Neo’s, especially on the multicore tests, where its 10-core M5 chip has a clear advantage over the Neo’s six-core A18 Pro. The M5 Air also excelled on the Geekbench AI benchmark, showing the power of the M5’s 16-core neural processor for handling on-device AI calculations.

Graphics performance is also improved. With the M5 update coming to the MacBook Air, it’s now on the same level as the 14-inch MacBook Pro that received the M5 jolt at the end of last year. I ran the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme test on the M5 Air to see how it compared with the M5 MacBook Pro, and the two finished with very similar results, with each significantly ahead of last year’s M4 MacBook Pro. The higher-powered M5 Pro and M5 Max chips in the updated MacBook Pros are in a different class of performance altogether, but they come at much higher prices to match their higher performance.

The gains in performance aren’t enough to upgrade if you’re happily humming along with an M4 Air or an M3 model. I might also hold onto an M2 Air for another year in the hopes that we get a design overhaul next year. The MacBook Air hasn’t changed its look since the M2 Air did away with the tapered chassis of the M1 Air back in 2022. For M1 owners, I might suggest an M5 upgrade, especially since the M1 model wasn’t available in the larger 15-inch size. Why not step up in performance and size?

Battery life remains long, but Apple hasn’t made any major leaps in this area recently. The M5 Air ran for just over 17 hours on our YouTube streaming battery rundown test, which was a little over an hour longer than last year’s model but still shorter than the M3 Air ran. Getting 17 hours on a single charge is great, but there are Windows laptops like the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus and Dell XPS 14 that offer even longer battery life.

Should I buy a 13-inch M5 MacBook Air?

This is a harder question to answer with the arrival of the MacBook Neo. Before the Neo, the 13-inch Air was the most affordable path to a MacBook. Now that route has been cut off by the $599 Neo. The Air’s M5 processor certainly offers greater performance than the Neo’s iPhone chip, but the Air is almost twice as expensive, and its 13.6-inch display is hardly any larger than the Neo’s 13-inch panel. I’d argue that once you make the $500 jump to Air territory, it takes only another small hop to get the roomier 15-inch model and is the better option unless you really want to go smaller.