What to Expect – Appleosophy
https://appleosophy.com/2026/02/27/macbook-air-m5-what-to-expect/
Publish Date: 2026-02-27 11:00:00
Source Domain: appleosophy.com
The MacBook Air has been the best-valued laptop for Apple, but it won’t be for long with the imminent introduction of the lower-end “moniker-less” MacBook. Still, the MacBook Air continues to offer great, serious performance at such a low price. Although some people don’t see a refresh for the MacBook Air next week since the company will be announcing too many products, I still believe that Apple will update the MacBook Air next week, given the dwindling stock of the current MacBook Air. After all, Apple updated three Macs with the M4 series back in the last week of October 2024, so anything’s possible. Here’s everything I expect for the next MacBook Air.
Chip
Since the standard M5 chip was introduced on the base 14-inch MacBook Pro last October, I can assure you that the MacBook Air will be updated with the M5 chip. Currently, the 13-inch model comes with the binned M4 chip (10-core CPU/8-core GPU) by default, but you could configure it to the full-fledged M4 chip (10-core CPU/10-core GPU). No matter how you configure it, the 15-inch model comes with the full-fledged M4 chip (10-core GPU). Therefore, it’s likely that we’ll see the same approach as before, where the 13-inch M5 model will come with some binned variant of the M5 chip, but you can still configure it to the full-fledged variant. The 15-inch model will certainly feature the same full-fledged variant of the M5 chip that’s also used in the base 14-inch MacBook Pro.
The key difference between the MacBook Air and the base 14-inch MacBook Pro is that the MacBook Air lacks a fan, which allows for silent operation and passive-cooling, but at a cost of less sustained workloads. The base 14-inch MacBook Pro, on the other hand, continues to have one fan for active cooling and longer sustained workloads. The M5 chip on the base 14-inch MacBook Pro also features faster memory bandwidth, so we could see the same advantage for the M5 MacBook Air as well.
Display and Colors
I expect the…
