New M5 MacBook Air And Pro Announced With Double The Storage And Blazing Speeds

Following the announcement of the iPhone 17e and the iPad Air with M4 chip, Apple today revealed the new MacBook Air with M5 processor and the higher-end version of the MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. These new laptops come with more storage, Apple's built-in connectivity chip, and a few other tweaks.

While the company is rumored to refresh the MacBook Pro lineup later this year with a redesign, meaning most users should just wait a little longer, the MacBook Air got even better, and continues to be the most reasonable option for anyone thinking about getting a Mac.

"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." Here's everything you need to know about the new M5 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models ahead of Wednesday's pre-sale, and their official release next week.

Available in 13 and 15-inch models, the new MacBook Air with M5 chip has 4x faster performance than the previous generation for AI tasks, while also improving on graphic processing thanks to Neural Accelerators in each GPU core. Apple touts that this laptop is great for running AI models locally, and thanks to its unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth, it will feel snappier when customers are editing a video, rendering a 3D object with ray-tracing, or even just processing lots of images.

One of the greatest enhancements from the previous generation is that the MacBook Air comes with base 512GB of storage, and can go up to 4TB of storage for the first time. This new SSD also performs two times better for reading and writing data than the M4 model. Other improvements include Apple's new N1 chip, an in-house solution for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 bringing improved connectivity performance, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, improved 12MP Center Stage camera, and up to 18 hours of battery life.

Besides that, Apple continues to offer the same sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver color options of the previous generation. While the MacBook Air might feel slightly more expensive, as it once again starts at $1,099, its base storage doubling arguably evens that out.

After releasing the base M5 MacBook Pro last year, Apple is finally updating the higher end model with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The company says it has up to 4x better AI performance than the M4 generation, and if customers are choosing the M5 Pro model, it starts with 1TB of storage, while the M5 Max option comes with at least 2TB.

The new chips feature an up to 18-core-CPU, delivering up to 30% faster performance than the previous generation, and Apple says it's the world's fastest CPU core. The new GPU architecture with Neural Accelerator makes graphics performance 50% better than the M4 models, as the company stresses that these laptops are made for LLM prompt processing, 3D rendering, and high quality content editing. The M5 Pro now can feature up to 64GB of memory and up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth; the M5 Max version, on the other hand, can have up to 128GB of RAM and up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Just like the MacBook Air, Apple also added a new SSD, which reads and writing data twice as fast as the previous model, with up to 14.5GB/s speeds. It also features Apple's N1 connectivity chip with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support. This laptop also has three Thunderbolt 5 ports, and starts at $2,199.