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M5 MacBook Air Review (13-Inch, 2026): Go Big or Go Neo – USA All Americans NEWS™
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M5 MacBook Air Review (13-Inch, 2026): Go Big or Go Neo

Apple M5 MacBook Air laptop in front of a house plant

M5 MacBook Air (13-inch, 2026)

Cons

  • Costs $500 more than MacBook Neo
  • Display isn’t much bigger than the Neo’s
  • Same design since 2022

The MacBook Air has lost its spot as Apple’s entry-level laptop. And, on top of that, its price has gone up $100. Built around Apple’s latest M-series processor, the M5 MacBook Air starts at $1,099. That’s a full $500 more than the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new option for budget-conscious laptop shoppers. While the Air itself isn’t in danger of getting squeezed in the middle — the cheapest 14-inch MacBook Pro is $600 more than the baseline Air — it’s the space between the MacBook Neo and the larger, 15-inch MacBook Air that’s crowding out the 13-inch Air.

Apple M5 MacBook Air in sky blue

The M5 MacBook Air comes in the same colors as before, including the sky blue option introduced last year.

Matt Elliott/CNET

The number of cores didn’t change with the M5, but the chip introduces a new GPU architecture that puts a neural accelerator on each core to boost AI and ray-tracing performance. The M5 chip also supports faster unified memory — 153GBps of bandwidth compared to 120GBps on the M4. And the M5 Air features faster SSDs that Apple says offer twice the read and write speeds of the previous M4 model.

The M5 Air also offers improved networking. It incorporates Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Apple sent me the 1TB version of the M5 Air that costs $1,299. The M5 MacBook Air 15 starts at £1,099 in the UK and AU$1,799 in Australia.

Apple MacBook Air keyboard and trackpad

The M5 Air has the same layout as last year’s model.

Matt Elliott/CNET

The gains in performance aren’t enough to upgrade if you’re happily humming along with an M4 Air or an M3 model. I might also hold onto an M2 Air for another year in the hopes that we get a design overhaul next year. The MacBook Air hasn’t changed its look since the M2 Air did away with the tapered chassis of the M1 Air back in 2022. For M1 owners, I might suggest an M5 upgrade, especially since the M1 model wasn’t available in the larger 15-inch size. Why not step up in performance and size?

Battery life remains long, but Apple hasn’t made any major leaps in this area recently. The M5 Air ran for just over 17 hours on our YouTube streaming battery rundown test, which was a little over an hour longer than last year’s model but still shorter than the M3 Air ran. Getting 17 hours on a single charge is great, but there are Windows laptops like the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus and Dell XPS 14 that offer even longer battery life.

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