MacBook Air M5 vs MacBook Air M4: What Actually Changed

The MacBook Air M5 costs $1,099 and starts you at 512GB of storage and 153GB/s of memory bandwidth; the MacBook Air M4 it replaces launched at $999 with 256GB of storage and 120GB/s of bandwidth, and as of this writing Apple no longer sells it new on apple.com at all. If you're choosing between the two today, the real decision isn't M5 versus M4 — it's M5 versus a discounted, out-of-production M4 from a retailer. Here's exactly what changed, and which one is worth your money.

Price and availability: M5 vs M4

Apple announced the M5 MacBook Air on March 3, 2026, with pre-orders opening the next day and units shipping from March 11. In the US, the 13-inch model starts at $1,099 ($999 for education buyers), and the 15-inch starts at $1,299 ($1,199 for education), per Apple's official announcement. That's a $100 increase over the M4 13-inch model's original $999 starting price.

Checking Apple's current MacBook Air buying page shows every listed configuration — 13-inch and 15-inch, all four colors, all memory and storage tiers — is built around the M5 chip. There is no M4 option left in Apple's own lineup. If you want a new M4 Air today, your only route is a third-party retailer selling through remaining stock, typically at a discount off the original $999 price.

Apple also offers the usual trade-in and financing paths on the M5 Air: Apple Trade In credit toward a new machine, AppleCare+ (or AppleCare One in the US), and in the US, 0% APR Apple Card Monthly Installments. None of that changes the underlying math — you're paying $100 more up front for the newer chip, storage and wireless — but it's worth factoring in if a trade-in on an old Mac can close most of that gap.

Why the M4 disappeared from Apple's store

Apple doesn't sell previous-generation MacBook Airs alongside new ones the way it sometimes does with iPhone (keeping last year's model at a lower price point). When the M5 Air launched, it replaced the M4 Air outright in Apple's catalog rather than sliding it down to a budget tier. That makes this comparison less "which new Mac should I buy" and more "is paying $100 more for M5 worth it, or should I hunt for M4 clearance stock instead."

It's a pattern Apple has repeated across recent Mac launches: when a new chip generation ships, the previous one is retired from the main store rather than kept on as a cheaper tier, with education and enterprise channels sometimes the exception. That's different from how Apple treats the iPhone lineup, where last year's flagship often sticks around at a reduced price, so shoppers coming from iPhone upgrade cycles may be surprised there's no official "cheaper Air" sitting next to the M5 model.

Chip and performance

Both machines use a 10-core CPU (4 performance cores, 6 efficiency cores) and offer an 8-core or 10-core GPU option, with a 16-core Neural Engine. The architectural jump is in the GPU: M5 adds a Neural Accelerator inside each GPU core, plus a third-generation hardware ray-tracing engine and upgraded shader cores — neither of which M4 has.

Apple's own benchmarks (run in February 2026, on preproduction hardware, so treat them as vendor figures rather than independent tests) claim M5 is up to 4x faster than M4 for AI tasks, and up to 9.5x faster than the now-ancient M1 Air. For more conventional workloads, Apple cites Topaz Video AI enhancement running up to 1.9x faster than M4, Blender's ray-traced renderer up to 1.5x faster, and Affinity Photo image processing up to 1.5x faster. None of these are huge generational leaps outside of AI-accelerated tasks — if you don't run AI image, video or coding tools locally, the practical speed difference between M5 and M4 for everyday browsing, email and office work will be hard to notice.

What the Neural Accelerators actually enable

The M5's per-core GPU Neural Accelerators are specifically aimed at the on-device AI features Apple has been building into macOS: Image Playground and Genmoji generation, Writing Tools rewrites, Visual Intelligence, and the local models behind Shortcuts actions that use Apple Intelligence. M4 Airs run the same macOS Tahoe features, but M5's extra AI throughput is what shows up as shorter waits when you generate an image, summarize a long email thread, or run a Live Translation during a call in Messages. If you rarely touch any of those features, the Neural Accelerators are mostly dormant silicon — the kind of spec that matters a lot for some buyers and not at all for others.

Apple also pitches the M5 Air directly at people switching from Windows laptops, not just M4 owners: its own figures claim web browsing up to 50% faster than a PC laptop built around an Intel Core Ultra X7 chip, and more demanding tasks up to 2x faster. Treat that the same way as the M4 comparison — it's Apple's internal testing, not an independent lab result, but it's a useful data point if you're shopping against a Windows ultrabook rather than your own aging Mac.

Memory and storage

Unified memory options are identical on paper — both chips offer 16GB, 24GB or 32GB configurations — but M5 moves 153GB/s of memory bandwidth versus M4's 120GB/s, a 28% increase that should help most with GPU-heavy and AI workloads rather than general multitasking.

Storage is where M5 buyers get a real, immediate upgrade: the base configuration doubles from 256GB (M4) to 512GB (M5), and for the first time Apple offers a 4TB configure-to-order option on the Air line, up from 2TB on M4. Apple also says the SSD controller in M5 models reads and writes roughly twice as fast as the previous generation's.

Display, battery and design

There's no change here at all. Both the 13-inch (13.6-inch, 2560x1664, 224 ppi) and 15-inch (15.3-inch, 2880x1864, 224 ppi) panels are identical IPS Liquid Retina displays at 500 nits with P3 wide color and True Tone, on both M4 and M5 models. Apple's battery claims are also unchanged: up to 18 hours of video playback and up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing. The fanless aluminum chassis, weight (2.7 lb for 13-inch, 3.3 lb for 15-inch) and dimensions carry over too — if you liked the shape of the M4 Air, the M5 Air feels identical in your bag.

Color options are also unchanged: both generations come in sky blue, midnight, starlight and silver. Apple's materials claims for the M5 Air include 55% recycled content overall, a 100% recycled aluminum enclosure, and a 100% recycled cobalt battery, part of the company's broader push to be carbon neutral across its full footprint by 2030. The M4 Air used similar recycled-material commitments for its generation, so this is less a point of differentiation than a baseline both machines share.

Wireless: the N1 chip changes more than it looks

The one spec that's a genuine, no-asterisks upgrade is wireless. M5 models ship with Apple's own N1 wireless chip, bringing Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support, plus Thread for smart-home devices. M4 models are limited to Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. If you have a Wi-Fi 7 router or lean on Bluetooth for audio and accessories, this is the upgrade most likely to produce a difference you can actually feel day to day — arguably more than the AI benchmark gains most people won't use.

Ports and external displays

Port counts are unchanged: two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports, a MagSafe 3 charging port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on both generations. Apple's M5 spec page lists the M5 Air supporting up to two external displays at 6K/60Hz or 4K/144Hz, or one display at up to 8K/60Hz — a modest step up from M4's two-display limit of 6K/60Hz, though most buyers won't push either machine that far.

Neither generation gained a third port or an SD card slot, which remains the Air line's biggest concession to its thin-and-light design — if you shoot a lot of photo or video and need fast card transfers, that's still a reason to look at the MacBook Pro line instead, where Apple keeps an SDXC slot and HDMI port on the higher-end chassis.

Who should actually buy which

Buy the M5 Air if: you're buying new from Apple (it's your only new option anyway), you want the bigger base storage and faster SSD without configuring up, you use AI-accelerated creative or coding tools where Apple's 4x claims might translate to real time saved, or you want Wi-Fi 7 for a future-proofed home network.

Look for M4 clearance stock instead if: you can find a new or certified-refurbished M4 Air meaningfully cheaper than $1,099, your workload is browsing, writing, spreadsheets and video calls rather than AI or 3D rendering, and you don't care about Wi-Fi 7. For that kind of everyday use, the M4 Air remains a genuinely capable laptop — you're paying extra for headroom most people won't use yet, per Apple's own M4 tech specs.

If the Air's fanless design is too light on power for what you do, Apple's M6 and M5 Pro MacBook Pro lineup trades portability for sustained performance, and its desktop Mac Studio line scales all the way up to M5 Ultra for workloads no laptop chip can handle.

What to do next

If you're buying new today, Apple's own store will only sell you the M5 configuration — check current configurations and regional pricing on Apple's MacBook Air page before you order, since memory and storage tiers affect the final price more than the chip jump does. If you specifically want M4 and a lower price, check certified refurbished listings or education pricing before paying full retail for last year's chip at this year's discount. And if a desktop makes more sense than a laptop for your next Mac, the redesigned M6 iMac is worth a look too.

Written byMara Lindqvist

Mara Lindqvist edits the hardware desk. She covers graphics cards, processors, memory and storage, the foundries and chip designers behind them, and what the numbers on a spec sheet mean for people choosing a PC. Specifications in her stories come from manufacturer spec pages and datasheets.

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