M4 vs. M5 MacBook Air Buyer’s Guide
M4 vs. M5 MacBook Air Buyer’s Guide
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m4-vs-m5-macbook-air/
Publish Date: 2026-04-28 13:07:00
Source Domain: www.macrumors.com
Apple last month announced a new MacBook Air, introducing the M5 chip, faster wireless connectivity, double the base storage, and a more capable charger, while simultaneously discontinuing the M4 model. So how does the new machine compare?
The M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch, a $100 increase over the equivalent M4 models. In exchange, base storage doubles from 256GB to 512GB, and Apple says the new SSD delivers twice the read and write speeds of the previous generation. Education pricing is also available directly from Apple and typically shaves at least $100 off the price.
The main upgrade between the two models is the chip. Compared to the M4, the M5 delivers:
- Up to 15% faster multithreaded CPU performance
- Up to 30% faster overall graphics performance
- Up to 45% faster ray tracing performance
- 27.5% higher unified memory bandwidth
In addition to these general performance claims, Apple published a set of specific real-world workload results showing measurable gains in AI-driven applications:
- 4×+ peak GPU compute performance for AI
- 3.6× faster time to first token (LLM)
- 1.8× faster Topaz Video Enhance AI processing
- 1.7× faster Blender ray-traced rendering
- 2.9× faster AI speech enhancement in Premiere Pro
Beyond raw performance, the M5 introduces several meaningful architectural changes. The GPU includes a dedicated Neural Accelerator in every core, a hardware addition absent from the M4, and Apple is exposing this via new Metal 4 developer APIs with Tensor capabilities.
The ray tracing engine advances to its third generation, and dynamic caching moves to its second generation. Memory bandwidth rises from 120 GB/s to 153 GB/s, enabled by the move from TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process (N3E) to its third-generation 3nm process (N3P).
The M5 MacBook Air also gains Apple’s N1 wireless chip, bringing Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 in place of the M4 model’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
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