- it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent
- a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use
- best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU
- no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff all the time
- much better real world performance on battery than x64 processors (!). you can get reasonable perf by setting Intel/AMD CPUs to high perf, but then goodbye battery life and get ready for very loud fans. this is simply a point not emphasized enough, the real world battery perf of Intel/AMD laptops is very sluggish on default power modes and despite that, they consume more battery than the M5
- amazing battery life
- good workmanship, no creaking, good hardware overall (mics, webcam, keyboard, touchpad!)
- very good speakers
It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps.
Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 series) should have a much longer useful life and avoid disk/storage aging as rapidly from the constant swapping.
But ...
The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Which has a 14 inch screen and can run Linux.
Macbook Neo, probably coming with the iPhone A-series chips https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/03/apple-accidentally-leak...
The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.
This is a solid product, that continually receives incremental improvements and delivered at a lower price point (when spec'd out).
I just looked up my M1 receipt: in 2020 I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16G memory and 512G SSD for 1399,- inc tax.
I did not expect the price for a base machine to go down in 2026.
Anyhow, because the differences between my M3 and the new M5 are just the CPU/GPU and I am not actually hurt much by the current CPU speed, I won't be upgrading.
If one wants to serve large-ish LLMs locally, an M3 Mac Studio w/ 512 GB/RAM is still a super compelling option, and I was hoping that the M5's would bump us up to 1TB of unified memory.
Don't get me wrong -- seeing them use LMStudio as the benchmark for measuring local LLM inference is super awesome for the local / open-source LLM community, but seeing this have the same 128GB cap as the M4 is... disappointing?
M3 Studio is still the best option if one wants 512GB.
I make it clear it's not about specs, it's not about UI, its about the fact that apple makes the world actively worse so they can sell you a better alternative.
You cant have iMessage anywhere else because they don't want you to, you are locked into apple stores because they refuse competition, you cant repair your own device because they get that money back in repair fees.
Its not about the operating system or the specs, I feel investing in Linux is the best way to create a more sustainable future for me and the ones I love and changing that take will require systemic changes, not these spec bumps and UI overhauls people fixate on.
- pro motion (120hz screen).
- better display brightness which is important when there is a bright sun outside.
- 1 more USB-C port and HDMI port (no dongle hell).
- 20% more battery life.
- This is more personal, but 13" is too small and 15" is too big, so 14" MBP worked best for me (~25 HFOV with a stand + KBM).
It's hard to justify saving 400 bucks given the gap between the models, but the decision is closer since the air has 16GB memory by default since M4 AFAIK.
The language towards the end of the press release implies to me that they're targeting last-gen Intel MacBook Air users thinking about upgrades more than anyone with an M2/3/4 MacBook.
My worst purchase thus far.
Hardware is completely boring now. That also applies to Phones
I’ll probably buy this, unless the cheap one they release tomorrow is better. A current MacBook is something like 30x more powerful than my ancient one. It’s going to be insane.
1) The price for a 14" model with the most powerful Max processor with 128GB of RAM ($5099 with all else left at the default settings) doesn't seem to have jumped hugely considering what's being going on with RAM prices in the world.
2) Interesting/disappointing that they aren't offering a model with even more RAM, further jumping on the local inference train.
next year we get the M6 Titanium and then the M7e
The difference is in the number of GPU cores. One chip has an 8-core GPU, while the other has a 10-core GPU.
Time flies...
Remember how cool MagSafe was? Tripping over a cable no longer meant smashing your laptop. In the late 2000s, this was amazing. Then they made the laptops thinner so we got MagSafe 2. Annoying if you had chargers but whatever. And then... gone.
Macbook Air? The 2008 version I don't count. It's a weird and bad product. But the 2010/2011 products were rock solid and nobody could compete with Apple's value proposition for the hardware. Nobody. And they continued to be amazing but suffered from a screen that didn't get an upgrade from 2011 (IIRC). Where was the retina display? It was such an obvious upgrade.
But then Apple killed it for the 12" Macbook, which was a horrible product. Too many compromises. A single port. Ugh. That was Johnny Ive's baby.
Oh and let's not forget the whole butterly keyboard debacle, all for an estimated 0.5mm decrease in thickness. It failed because it got dust in it. It was expensive to replace. It was just a terrible design decision.
Oh and the Touch Bar? Please.
It was clear that Apple just wanted to increase the ASP of hheir laptops. So getting a good laptop for $1000 was no longer on the cards. Instead we were forced into the 13" Macbook Pro at the better part of $2000.
And here we are in 2026. MagSafe is back (has been for a few years obviously). The butterfly keyboard got ditched (again, some years ago). And they of course killed in the 12" Macbook and brought back to Macbook Air (again, some years ago).
But my point is that in many ways the 2026 Macbook air looks a lot like the 2010-2015 Macbook Air. Updated specs of course but it sits in that same segment of being "good enough" for most people and being excellent value.
One simply cannot overstate the importance of being able to walk into an Apple Store and just buying one. For me, this alone kills buying almost anything else. Even getting a charger for non-Apple laptops could be nontrivial. It's less of an issue now with USB-C charging but a lot of higher end Windows laptops can't draw enough power so still have their own chargers.
I like 16GB/512GB as the new baseline. Given what AI has done to RAM and SSD pricing, a slight price bump to $1099 seems perfectly acceptable to me.
Though a bit disappointing that it came with a $100 (almost 10%, above inflation) price bump. There's not much point to a spec bump when it's paired with a price bump, and faster specs for more money is usually an option. This negative price-sensitivity is particularly important for a model (Air) that caters to casual users, who typically aren't at all begging for spec bumps, and certainly not willing to pay much extra for them.
Yes the new cheap macbook will fill the gap below it, but the new MBA's don't seem like great value play. I recently bought a new old M2 model for roughly a 40% discount for my girlfriend and the value is insane. Same ports, screen, battery life, same formfactor/weight/keyboard, same software, storage, memory. Only it doesn't have the latest fast M5 chip, but for almost all Air users I think that's not a necessity. Certainly my gf wouldn't experience a difference in the next 6-8 years of use I think she'll reasonably get out of this thing.
Which is a fantastic position to be in, Apple creates so much value here that older models are amazing and affordable. But new models just don't seem very interesting to buy.
I did get tricked into putting Tahoe (or whatever the iOS version is called) on my iPhone 12 Pro though, and my phone is now sluggish and sad, so I am going to have to upgrade it, which I'm carrying quite a lot of resentment about. Hoping I can hold off until the fold phone.