It's early days in the life of the MacBook Air M5, which Apple unveiled this week along with a new iPhone 17e, a new MacBook Pro, and that wild MacBook Neo, but I can now confirm that it is faster than the MacBook Air M4, one of our favorite laptops.
Granted, I've run just one set of test moments after unboxing and updating the laptop to macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but it was enough to prove that even in the more mainstream and ultra-popular MacBook Air, the M5 delivers.
After installing Geekbench 6.6 on both the new 13-inch MacBook Air M5 (in Starlight finish) and my 13-inch MacBook Air M4 (in Sky Blue), I ran the core CPU benchmark in a side-by-side test.
Geekbench shows, by the way, that the M5 is clocked slightly higher than the M4, 4.46Ghz on the M5 and 4.41GHz on the M4. Naturally, both chips are also 10 Core with the same number of performance and efficiency cores (4 and 6, respectively). But those numbers don't tell the full story.
Single and multi-core scores are measurably higher on the MacBook Air M5, as you can see from the results photo below (M5 is on the left).
|
Single Core |
Multi-Core |
|
|
MacBook Air M5 |
4190 |
17073 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
3832 |
15034 |
The results are in line with the M5 scores we saw last year on the then-new 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip.
The differences are even more pronounced on the GPU score, where the M5 SoC brings a neural accelerator to every GPU Core. The leap is substantial on OpenCL scores and more modest on the native Metal results.
|
GPU (OpenCL) |
GPU (Metal) |
|
|
MacBook Air M5 |
47171 |
49557 |
|
MacBook Air M4 |
30132 |
48075 |
Obviously, all of these results are preliminary. I haven't run Cinebench; I haven't yet tested the speed of the supposedly faster SSD. What I can see, though, even in these early hours, is that the MacBook Air M5 is up to the challenge of some pretty difficult tasks.
I've loaded:
- Lies of P,
- Pixelmator Pro
- Adobe Lightroom
- Safari
- Chrome (25 tabs)
- FinalCut Pro
And the system is still just chugging along, likely assisted in part by the 16GB of RAM.
Basically, we're now seeing Pro-level performance on the MacBook Air, which is obviously why Apple introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max for its latest line of MacBook Pros. Good old Apple, always aiming higher.
More to come as we work through our full review of the MacBook Air M5.
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