24 hours with the MacBook Air M5 — it’s already faster than the M4 MacBook Air
24 hours with the MacBook Air M5 — it’s already faster than the M4 MacBook Air
Publish Date: 2026-03-06 16:02:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
It’s early days in the life of the MacBook Air M5, which Apple unveiled this week along with a new iPhone 17e, a new MacBook Pro, and that wild MacBook Neo, but I can now confirm that it is faster than the MacBook Air M4, one of our favorite laptops.
Granted, I’ve run just one set of test moments after unboxing and updating the laptop to macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but it was enough to prove that even in the more mainstream and ultra-popular MacBook Air, the M5 delivers.
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(Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)Swipe to scroll horizontally
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
Single Core |
Multi-Core |
|
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 the M5 chip.
The differences are even more pronounced on the GPU score, where the M5 SoC brings a neural accelerator to every GPU Core. The leap is substantial on OpenCL scores and more modest on the native Metal results.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
| 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 yet tested the speed of the supposedly faster SSD. What I can see, though, even in these early hours, is that the…
