Apple Announces M5 MacBook Air and Updated MacBook Pro with Performance Jumps
The new MacBook Air doubles base storage to 512GB and gains Wi-Fi 7, while the MacBook Pro gains M5 Pro and M5 Max chips with larger base storage.
Apple on Tuesday announced the new MacBook Air with M5 alongside refreshed MacBook Pro models powered by M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, with preorders opening Wednesday and in-store availability beginning March 11. The announcements came alongside a third product — the budget MacBook Neo — as Apple restructured its laptop lineup around its own silicon across three distinct price points.
The M5 MacBook Air doubles base storage to 512GB — twice the previous generation's 256GB starting configuration — and can now be configured up to 4TB for the first time. Apple said the M5 chip delivers up to 4 times faster performance for AI tasks compared to the M4 MacBook Air, and up to 9.5 times faster than the M1 generation.
The new model also gains Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via Apple's N1 wireless chip. Battery life holds at up to 18 hours.
Pricing increases by $100 to $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch version.
The MacBook Pro lineup receives M5 Pro and M5 Max configurations, each featuring an 18-core CPU. The M5 Pro offers up to a 20-core GPU, while the M5 Max scales to 40 cores.
All M5 MacBook Pro models now start with 1TB of storage rather than 512GB. Prices rise across the board: the base 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,699, with the M5 Pro at $2,199 and the M5 Max at $3,599.
"The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world's most popular laptop," said John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. The simultaneous refresh across three laptop lines gave Apple its broadest Mac lineup in years, spanning from the $599 Neo to the $3,599 MacBook Pro M5 Max.
Read the original reporting at The Verge.
