No Mercy for Apple, Amazon Offloads the New MacBook Air M5 to Its All-Time Low and Anyone Can Grab It

Source Domain: kotaku.com

Apple doesn’t discount the MacBook Air. Amazon apparently didn’t get the memo. The new MacBook Air M5 is sitting at $949 right now, a $150 drop from Apple’s $1,099 asking price, which is the lowest this 2026 model has ever been sold for anywhere, on a machine with the M5 chip, 16GB of unified memory, a 512GB SSD, Wi-Fi 7, and up to 18 hours of battery life. No Prime membership required, no promo code, no catch.

See at Amazon

What the M5 chip changes about everyday use

The M5 brings a faster CPU and next-generation GPU with Neural Accelerators over the M4, which means the performance gap between the Air and the Pro lineup has narrowed again in Apple’s favor. Multitasking across heavy creative apps, browser sessions with dozens of tabs, and background processes running simultaneously stays fluid in a way that Intel-era MacBooks at twice the weight couldn’t match. The unified memory architecture means the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine all draw from the same 16GB pool rather than operating on separate memory stacks, which eliminates the bottlenecks that slow down tasks requiring heavy data movement between processor components.

Apple Intelligence runs natively on the M5’s Neural Engine, which handles on-device AI processing without sending data to external servers. Writing tools, image generation, notification summaries, and Priority Messages in Mail all run locally, which means faster responses and stronger privacy guarantees than cloud-dependent AI features on competing platforms. For anyone already in the Apple ecosystem, iPhone Mirroring lets you view and control your iPhone directly from the MacBook screen, and Universal Clipboard means copying on one device and pasting on the other works without any setup.

The 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display supports 1 billion colors with the contrast and sharpness that makes photo and video work on a 13-inch screen actually viable. The 12MP Center Stage camera keeps you in frame…

Source