While the MacBook Pro steals the headlines, Apple’s most popular laptop is also getting an upgrade soon. Here’s everything we know about the next-generation MacBook Air.
The new MacBook Air will be special
Apple’s new MacBook Air is not expected to be a major redesign. Instead, Apple is once again focusing on better performance.
The new MacBook Air will be powered by the M5 chip, an upgrade from the current generation M4 processor. What does this mean in terms of performance?
When Apple announced the M5 MacBook Pro last year, Apple touted that the M5 offers “4x the GPU computing power for AI compared to the M4, with next-generation GPUs with a Neural Accelerator in each core, a more powerful CPU, a faster Neural Engine, and higher unified memory bandwidth.”
In benchmark testing, the M5 chip achieved roughly 9-10% faster performance than the M4 chip in single-core CPU performance, 19% faster in multi-core CPU performance, and 37% faster in GPU performance.
Apart from the upgrade to the M5 chip, we don’t expect any other changes in the new MacBook Air. It will retain the same design and 13-inch/15-inch form factors.
Apple is likely to release the M5 MacBook Air during the first half of the year. The M4 MacBook Air, for context, was released in March of last year, and the M3 MacBook Air was released in March 2023.
Those year-to-year Mac upgrades aren’t necessarily super exciting. However, they are a great example of what Apple can do when it has full control over its hardware.
Since the start of the Apple Silicon era in 2020, we’ve seen Apple consistently release updates for (almost) all of its Mac models—something it simply couldn’t do when it relied on Intel.
Planning to buy a new Mac this year? Let us know down in the comments. If you don’t want to wait for the M5 MacBook Air, you can save on the M4 now.
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