Apple Announces MacBook Air With M5 Chip and 512GB Base Storage
Apple today announced refreshed MacBook Air models featuring the M5 chip and a higher base SSD capacity.
The M5 chip in the MacBook Air features a 10-core CPU, with what Apple calls the world's fastest CPU cores. It offers configurations with up to 10 GPU cores with Neural Accelerators in each core, delivering up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks than the MacBook Air with the M4 chip.
The chip also has enhanced shader cores and a third-generation ray-tracing engine, along with faster unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth, which is a 28% improvement over the M4.
In addition to the M5 chip, the MacBook Air now contains Apple's custom N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity.
The MacBook Air now starts with 512GB of storage and continues to be configurable up to 4TB. The SSD also has 2x faster read and write performance compared to the previous generation.
The new MacBook Air is available for pre-order starting on Wednesday, March 4, with launch taking place on Wednesday, March 11. It starts at $1,099, $100 more than the previous generation.
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