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Laptops · Apple MacBook Air

Apple MacBook Air M5

14owners with an opinion
78%of verdicts positive
7/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and noise; criticized for display and reliability.

What owners wrote

Likes it
Earlier this year, a few weeks before the price hike, I bought an MacBook Air M5, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Long battery life and silent. The last part is important for me. I've gotten so fed up over the years by Wintel (Windows/Intel) machines where the fans are always running, even when idle. My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?
Doesn’t like it
Ah, very interesting! I'm a little disappointed, but it's understandable. Well, my first run wasn't very pretty .. installed it on a MacBook Air M5 with 16Gigs of RAM, set it up to access the local ollama instance (because I'm cheap like that), gave it a local JUCE app with a prompt to "analyze the project for issues porting from 32-bit to 64-bit" .. plugged in the laptop as it started processing, and then the system froze. I guess Juggler doesn't like display/USB enumeration events while its busy having ollama chug up all the resources .. well, that produced a system crash .. so came back, set it all back up again, and was .. after a few minutes .. told "the 'ls' tool is not available on this system" .. hmm .. I guess I might have missed a few setup steps in my rush to get it cranking on my JUCE project .. In any case, will tinker with it some more, looks really great and a nice way to organize AI into a functional UI - especially better than some of the other things I've been using lately (hermes, mostly..) ..
Likes it
This is what I run on an M5 MacBook Air 32GB. Works great. I’m not having it build whole features from scratch, though. I give it pretty explicit instructions closer to the class or function level, and it still saves me an immense amount of time, while I’m very connected to the code that’s written. Definitely the sweet spot for me.
Neutral
I was planning to wait until the M6 generation to replace my 16" MBP M1 Pro. But after Cook said they will have to increase prices soon, I went out and bought an M5 15" Air with 24GB/1TB. I think the M6 Pro/Max generation will have a substantial price increase given the new design, OLED, N2 TSMC node, and memory prices not coming down.
Neutral
I would love this tbh, but it's just that context window issue for me right now. For my personal use, I have a MacBook Air M5 (maxed out), but I don't think I can run anything decent with large context window (for longer chat sessions) on it. I should also mention that I'm still learning about LLMs, so if I've missed something please do let me know. Running local LLMs is something I'm very interested in.
Likes it
I tried some smaller Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 quants on my MBA with M5/16GB and had like 20-60 tokens per second. At 60 it felt pretty okay and that hardware is on the lower end. I'd assume a Mac with 32-64GB memory would get some reasonable results.
Likes it
It isn't just thin: they are quiet and fast with the best trackpads, reasonable keyboards that (except for the idiotic move when they released the touch bar and dropped the escape key) have a reasonable layout that doesn't change much, and all of the power states work correctly every single time. I am the second most stubborn person I know in my friend group on this, and after only using a desktop for a couple years during the pandemic, I avoided having a mac laptop for the subsequent five years and it sucked . I finally caved after I realized the new M5 Macbook Air is actually likely to be faster for web browsing tasks and is somehow also (awkwardly?!) competitive at compiling code to the monster modern Xeon build I had just completed, and it doesn't even have a fan! As far as I am concerned, it is over: Apple has won on everything except screen quality (I am sadly now addicted to OLED and I fundamentally disagree with the Apple position of not having a touch screen on a laptop, a stance that is only more emboldened now that I spend a lot of time with children).
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
My son setup Gamepass a few years ago. It was the biggest rip off I've ever seen. So many things about Microsoft are out of kilter. I'm about to migrate my daughter away from a 3 year old Lenovo Yoga to a Macbook Air M5 - it's just too hard to administer, its now sluggish and the AI is completely in the way. She doesn't need it, and despite a few business practices of Apple I don't really like if I have to choose between them and Microsoft, then I choose Apple. I was not like this as a teenager. I went through DOS, Windows 3.1x, Window 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000/XP and then all the way to Windows 7. I have completely changed my mind now, it's really only Apple I want to use. Everything about Apple is easier.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
> The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon And costs ~800 more for 16Gb/512 with a slower CPU and worse battery life. As someone who spends his life on the road with a laptop, I strongly feel that anything that works for you under 3lbs is the sweet spot. The difference between 2.2 and 2.7lbs is miniscule in the grand scheme of my backpack.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
Not exciting at all, but a nice incremental upgrade. I always enjoy incremental upgrades from Apple as they're usually significant, and 4 years worth of increments add up to big leaps, to the point my 8 year upgrade cycle is usually quite exciting. 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.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - 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 There is simply nothing comparable in the Windows laptop world. You can maybe get a cheaper Windows laptop but it will be terrible in almost everything - the new Apple budget MacBooks will probably be a much better choice. And around $1000, there is no comparison. I wish it was different.