GoKawiilThe M5 MacBook Air launches tomorrow, and the first reviews are now available. Here’s what reviewers are saying.
Apple’s mid-tier MacBook is plenty powerful with M5 chip
MacBook Air now sits between the much more affordable, less powerful MacBook Neo, and the higher-end MacBook Pro. But reviews make clear that the M5 MacBook Air is still a powerhouse in its own right.
Lance Ulanoff writes at TechRadar:
I found the new 13-inch MacBook Air M5 more than capable of some pretty heavy-duty tasks. I started by opening Lightroom and loading in some raw images. Then I launched Final Cut Pro and imported an 8K 30 fps video, and then made three copies and started editing a video in which all four videos could play at once. Next, I loaded Pixelmater Pro and edited a photo. I also installed Chrome and opened 25 tabs (tuned to TechRadar, of course). After that, I installed and started playing Lies of P. Finally, I installed Steam and downloaded Inzoi, a rich, open-world SIM that sort of overwhelmed me with its choices and scope. The MacBook Air just kept going. At one point, I got a system message indicating that Inzoi was eating a lot of system processes and battery, and that I should consider switching to low power, but when I exited the game the battery was still near 90%. Overall, I found it difficult to stress the M5 and its 16GB of RAM.
For specific comparisons to the M4, Tom’s Guide shared a couple test results. Tony Polanco writes:
On Geekbench 6, which measures overall CPU performance, it pulled in a solid multi-core result of 17,276. That’s a noticeable jump over last year’s model (14,921)…In our Handbrake test, which tasks the laptop with transcoding a 4K video to 1080p, the MacBook Air M5 finished in 4 minutes and 34 seconds. That’s over 20 seconds faster than the previous model
These are modest improvements. But as noted by Dan Moren at Six Colors, M5 offers especially strong gains for anyone with an older MacBook Air.
He says, “go back to the M3, M2, M1, and you’re talking jumps in the 38 percent, 57 percent, and 75 percent range for single-core performance.”
Faster SSD speeds exceed Apple’s claims
... continue reading