Apple's new MacBook Air gets M5 and doubles starting storage — base price increases to $1,099

Apple today announced updates to its best-selling laptop, the MacBook Air. The thin laptop (and best ultrabook) is getting a bump up to the M5 processor and will start with 512GB of storage — double the 256GB that the Air used to begin with.

Customers will be able to bump up the laptop to 4TB of storage for the first time. Apple is promising a faster SSD with "2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation," a boon for local AI workloads as well as large files for creative work.

In addition, the MacBook Air will get Apple's N1 wireless chip to support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

But the new chip, SSD, and other upgrades will come at a cost. The M5 MacBook Air will start at $1,099 for the 13-inch model and $1,299 for the 15-inch version. Those are both $100 increases over the M4 MacBook Air, though it's likely we'll eventually see deals from third-party sellers like Amazon and Best Buy. The new MacBook Air laptops will be up for pre-order tomorrow, March 4, and will go on sale on Wednesday, March 11.

The 4TB option doesn't come cheap, though. It's $1,200 over the base price.

Most of Apple's performance claims position it against older MacBook Air laptops, positioning it as an ideal upgrade. But Apple also suggests that web browsing on the M5 is "up to 50 percent faster when compared to a PC laptop with an Intel Core Ultra X7 processor, and more demanding tasks get up to 2x faster performance."

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The 13-inch laptop starts with an M5 with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, while the bump to a 10-core GPU is a $100 increase. All 15-inch MacBook Airs come with the 10-core GPU, and every system also includes a 16-core neural engine on the chip.

Plenty is staying the same. Apple is retaining the same MacBook Air chassis. Apple has been using since the M2 chip in 2022, a fetching design with flat edges and rounded corners. There are no new colors this year, with Apple settling on sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver — the same as last year.

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