Apple’s New M5 MacBook Air Starts With 512GB of Faster SSD Storage

Apple has just announced the M5 MacBook Air, continuing its series of hardware announcements that started yesterday with the iPhone 17E and M4 iPad Air. Apple is doubling the base storage on the new M5-powered 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air, which now come with 512GB of faster SSD storage by default. However, the 13-inch model now starts at $1,099 instead of $999.

“The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world’s most popular laptop,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “With M5, MacBook Air powers through a wide range of tasks, from everyday productivity to creative workloads, and is even faster for AI. Now featuring double the starting storage, as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, in a sleek and durable design with long battery life, MacBook Air is the perfect laptop for anyone who values the unrivaled combination of performance and portability.”

The M5 Chip on the new MacBook Airs features 10 CPU cores, with neural accelerators in each GPU core. In comparison, the base M5 MacBook Pro that was released last fall has 10 GPU cores, but the performance delta shouldn’t be significant. Apple said that the M5 chip on the MacBook Air “delivers up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than MacBook Air with M4, and up to 9.5x faster than MacBook Air with M1.”

Apple offering 512GB of storage by default is great news, and the SSD in the latest MacBook Airs offers 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation. Customers can also configure the new laptops with up to 4TB of storage, up from 2TB on the previous model.

The M5 MacBook Air still comes with 16GB of unified memory, which can be bumped to 24GB or 32GB. Memory bandwidth has been upgraded to 153GB/s, compared to 120GB/s on the M4 models.

The other notable hardware change is the inclusion of Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. Otherwise, Apple still kept the same 12MP Center Stage camera, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and battery life (up to 18 hours) is also unchanged.

Apple’s new 13- and 15-inch M5 MacBook Airs are available in sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver, and they will be available for pre-order starting tomorrow, March 4, ahead of their March 11 release. The 13-inch model starts at $1,099, and the 15-inch version at $1,299.