It’s early days in the life of the MacBook Air M5, which Apple unveiled this week alongside a new iPhone 17e, a new MacBook Pro, and that wild MacBook Neo, but I can now confirm that it’s faster than the MacBook Air M4, one of our favorite laptops.
Of course, I only ran a series of tests moments after unboxing and updating the laptop to macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but it was enough to show that even on the most conventional and ultra-popular MacBook Air, the M5 delivers.
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
Single core |
Multicore |
|
MacBook Air M5 |
4190 |
17073 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
3832 |
15034 |
The results are in line with the M5 scores we saw last year on the then-new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip.
The differences are even more pronounced in the GPU score, where the M5 SoC brings a neural accelerator to each GPU core. The jump is substantial in OpenCL scores and more modest in native Metal results.
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
GPU (OpenCL) |
GPU (metal) |
|
MacBook Air M5 |
47171 |
49557 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
30132 |
48075 |
Obviously, all of these results are preliminary. I haven’t run Cinebench; I haven’t tested the speed of the supposedly faster SSD yet. However, what I can see, even in these early hours, is that the MacBook Air M5 is up to the challenge of some pretty difficult tasks.
I have uploaded:
- Lies of P,
- Pixelmator Pro
- Adobe Lightroom
- Safari
- Chrome (25 tabs)
- Final Cut Pro
And the system is still chugging along, probably helped in part by the 16GB of RAM.
Basically, we’re now seeing Pro-level performance in the MacBook Air, which is why Apple introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max for its latest line of MacBook Pros. Good old Apple, always aiming higher.
More to come as we work on our full MacBook Air M5 review.
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