00:04It's safe to say the MacBook Air 13-inch M5 is every bit as good as the M4 version,
00:09just a little faster. In fact, the differences are so scant that I almost directed you to my
00:14year-old review for a refresher. But I'm not that lazy. I've spent considerable time with
00:20this attractive, well-built aluminum slab. And while Apple didn't touch the design,
00:24they've tucked some serious revelations inside. We're talking a faster chip, a connectivity
00:30overhaul, and finally the end of a major storage headache. Is it worth the new slightly higher
00:36price tag? Let's dig in. Now, under the hood is the M5. It's still a 10-core architecture,
00:46four performance cores and six efficiency cores, but it's clocked higher at 4.46 GHz. In my testing,
00:52I saw a measurable jump in multi-core performance over the M4. But the real story is the GPU.
00:59Every core now has its own neural accelerator. Apple is claiming 4x faster AI performance than the M4.
01:05And then there's the M1 chip. It brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to the air. If you've got
01:11a Wi-Fi 7 hub,
01:12this thing is finally ready for our connectivity future. So it's the look you love,
01:16but with more performance and intelligence punch.
01:22Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room, the price. Over the years, the air has bounced
01:29around that $1,000 mark. This year, it's up to $1,099 or £1,099 in the UK. Now, usually
01:36I'd be
01:37grumbling, but I'm actually celebrating this hike. Why? Because the base model finally starts
01:42with 512 gigabytes of storage. No more worrying about how much macOS, Apple intelligence, some
01:49beefy app, or your extensive photos and video library are actually going to fit in the paltry
01:53256 gigabytes of storage. I spent years purging scratch disks in Photoshop because of that limit.
02:00Now you get double the space. And as a bonus, the storage is twice as fast. I'm seeing read-write
02:05speeds that actually beat some M4 Pro models. If you're moving large image libraries in Lightroom,
02:11you're going to feel that performance increase immediately.
02:19Externally, it's identical. 13.6-inch liquid retina display, 500 nits of brightness,
02:25and that familiar, fanless, silent operation. It's still 2.7 pounds of recycled aluminum.
02:31You've still got two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left, MagSafe, and a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.
02:37The 12-megapixel center stage camera remains excellent, keeping you framed during those frantic
02:43zoom calls. The keyboard and force-touch trackpad are still top of class. I actually wrote my entire
02:50review on this keyboard, and it really remains the gold standard for ultra portables. If you were
02:56hoping for a new color, sorry, same silver, starlight, midnight, and sky blue.
03:00The MacBook Air is built on the foundation of Mac OS 26. It's a rich, deep, and well-organized
03:08platform, consistent and stable in all the ways it needs to be. Sure, Apple Intelligence and Siri
03:14are not as powerful and useful as I would like, but there are some decent tidbits in there like
03:19writing tools and cleanup in photos. And generally, I love how the platform ties back into the rest of
03:26the Apple ecosystem. Now, Apple still promises 18 hours of battery life if you do nothing but stream
03:32video. In my real-world web browsing tests, I got about 15 and a half hours, but that's still a
03:38solid
03:38all-day machine. If you're on an M4 MacBook Air, stay put. The gains are great, but not life-changing.
03:48But if you're still on an M1, M2, or an Intel Mac, this is a massive leap. You're getting pro
03:54-level
03:55SSD speeds and AI capabilities in a silent, featherweight frame. The MacBook Air M5 is the best
04:02ultra-portable I've ever used. Yes, the price went up, but what you get back is worth every penny.
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