The MacBook Air M5 has landed — here’s what’s new on our favorite laptop

• Apple has announced the new MacBook Air M5
• Its gets improved wireless connectivity and the base storage has doubled
• You can pre-order the MacBook Air M5 from March with prices starting at a slightly higher $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799 for the 13-inch version

The MacBook Air M4 has reigned supreme at the top of our guide the world’s best laptops for months — and now Apple has replaced it with an even more powerful M5 version.

As the rumors predicted, the MacBook Air M5’s new chip is its main upgrade, with that excellent design and build remaining unchanged. It also has the same ports, with twin Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side with support for up to two external displays.

Apple says that new M5 chip will give you four times faster performance for AI tasks than the M4 version, and 1.9x faster performance in the likes of Topaz Video when doing AI video enhancement. However, as we’ve said previously, the M5 isn’t a massive leap over the M4 in everyday performance, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

The other main change is that the MacBook Air M5 now comes standard with 512GB storage (twice as much as before) and can be configured up to 4TB for the first time. The downside is that this is reflected in the pricing — the MacBook Air costs $100 more than the previous version.

While the MacBook Air M4 started at $999 / £999, the M5 version starts at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799 for the 13-inch version and $1,299 / £1,299 / AU$2,199 for the 15-inch model. You can pre-order them from tomorrow March 4, with delivery expected from March 11.

Building on a strong foundation

Aside from its new M5 chip, higher base storage and higher starting price tag, the MacBook Air M5 is largely the same as the M4 version, aside from a few connectivity boosts and an SSD speed injection.

Like the new MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Pro Max, the new MacBook Air gets Apple’s N1 wireless chip — and that means Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. Its new SSD also apparently gives you twice as fast read/write performance compared to the M4 model, which should be handy if you’re dealing with large image libraries in the likes of Adobe Lightroom.

Otherwise this MacBook Air will feel very familiar to fans of the series, and that’s no bad thing. We branded it our ‘laptop of the year’ last year, hailing its “potent combination of quick speeds and a long battery life”.

Apple claims the MacBook Air M5 has the same 18-hour battery life as its M4 predecessor — and while we got more like 14 hours for web-based activities in our tests, it’s still effectively an all-day battery life. You also get the same 13.6-inch or 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display as before, with 500 nits of brightness, which we called a “fantastic display for everything from gaming to streaming to content creation” in our M4 review.

Perhaps the only slight disappointment is that there’s no new color this year — the MacBook Air M5 is available in the same sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver colors as before. But that’s a small grumble and, on paper, Apple’s new MacBook Air looks a strong bet to claim the title of our favorite laptop again. We’ll be testing it very soon to let you know if that’s the case.

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Mark is TechRadar’s Senior news editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.