24 hours with the MacBook Air M5 — it’s already faster than the M4 MacBook Air
This is just the beginning of the life of the MacBook Air M5, which Apple unveiled this week alongside a new iPhone 17e, a new MacBook Pro and that crazy MacBook Neo, but I can now confirm that it’s faster than the MacBook Air M4, one of our favorite laptops.
Granted, I only ran a single round of testing after unboxing and updating the laptop to macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but it was enough to prove that even in the more mainstream and ultra-popular MacBook Air, the M5 is up to the task.
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
Single core |
Multi-core |
|
MacBook Air M5 |
4190 |
17073 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
3832 |
15034 |
The results are in line with the M5 scores we saw last year on the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip.
The differences are even more pronounced on the GPU score, where the M5 SoC brings a neural accelerator to each GPU Core. The jump is significant in the OpenCL scores and more modest in the native Metal results.
| Row 0 – Cell 0 |
GPU (OpenCL) |
GPU (Metal) |
|
MacBook Air M5 |
47171 |
49557 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
30132 |
48075 |
Obviously, all these results are preliminary. I haven’t run Cinebench; I haven’t tested the speed of the supposedly faster SSD yet. What I can see, however, even in these early hours, is that the MacBook Air M5 is up to the challenge of some pretty tough tasks.
I loaded:
- Lies of P,
- Pixelmateur Pro
- Adobe Lightroom
- Safari
- Chrome (25 tabs)
- FinalCut Pro
And the system continues to progress, probably helped in part by the 16 GB of RAM.
Basically, we’re now seeing Pro-level performance on the MacBook Air, which is obviously why Apple introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max for its latest MacBook Pro lineup. Good old Apple, which always aims higher.
More to come as we work on our full MacBook Air M5 review.
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