GoKawiilHaving lived with the M1 MacBook Air for a good few years, I had been eagerly waiting for the M5 update ever since hearing about its performance leap. I was so eager to get my hands on the new M5 MacBook Air that I ordered it the day it launched in India. And I’m happy to report that it not only lived up to those expectations but, in many ways, exceeded them, especially considering the hardware I came from.
Since it was a day-one purchase, I had to pay full price for the laptop. If someone asked me whether I regret it, I would reply with a resounding “no”. Now that the M5 MacBook Air is discounted for Amazon Prime Day, I can’t keep to myself just how fantastic a deal it is at its sale price.
Which laptop would you buy this Prime Day? 0 votes MacBook Air M5 NaN % MacBook Neo NaN % Windows laptop NaN % I'm skipping Prime Day NaN %
The Neo has got nothing on the Air
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
With the colorful new budget-oriented MacBook Neo making its debut with all its catchy design and incredible value proposition, the M5 MacBook Air got a bit sidelined. While the Neo got all the attention, the M5 Air turned out to be that reliable laptop for me that could run anything I could possibly throw at it without worrying about bottlenecking its hardware resources. And yes, Neo’s 8GB of RAM is indeed a bottleneck for any kind of serious work in 2026.
While the Neo is a fantastic product in itself, I am not its target customer. The Air gets me a better trackpad, a higher-quality display I’ve grown used to, and, more importantly, the M5 processor inside. Being Apple’s newest chip, it is able to run a bunch of large language models locally, without which I wouldn’t be able to test many of the AI tools that I use every single day. On top of that, RAM is becoming a scarce commodity these days, and the M5 MacBook Air happens to come with a generous 16GB of it from the base variant.
These hardware differences dictated that the M5 MacBook Air was a better overall deal for someone like me who doesn’t just write, but also occasionally uses more taxing apps, from video editing to web development and, of course, AI testing — sometimes all simultaneously.
I won’t bet on MacBooks getting cheaper
Until a few days ago, it was only speculation that memory shortages could lead to further price hikes. We have already seen Apple increase the prices of the MacBook Air, which starts at $1,099 instead of $999 last year. The company did soften the blow by doubling the base storage to 512GB, but I wouldn’t expect similar generosity from it going forward.
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