Gadronics
While the MacBook Pro is stealing headlines, Apple’s most popular laptop is also set to get an upgrade soon. Here’s everything we know about the next-generation MacBook Air.
The new MacBook Air will be a spec bump
Apple’s new MacBook Air isn’t expected to be a major revamp. Instead, Apple is focusing on improved performance once more.
The new MacBook Air will be powered by the M5 chip, an upgrade from the current generation’s M4 processor. What does this mean in terms of performance?
When Apple announced the M5 MacBook Pro last year, Apple touted that M5 offers “4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4, featuring a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, a more powerful CPU, a faster Neural Engine, and higher unified memory bandwidth.”
In benchmark testing, the M5 chip has scored roughly 9-10% faster than the M4 chip in single-core CPU performance, 19% faster in multi-core CPU performance, and 37% faster in GPU performance.
Other than the upgrade to the M5 chip, we aren’t expecting any other changes with the new MacBook Air. It will retain the same design and 13-inch/15-inch form factors.
Apple will likely release the M5 MacBook Air during the first half of the year. The M4 MacBook Air, for context, was released in March last year and the M3 MacBook Air was released in March 2023.
These year-over-year Mac upgrades aren’t necessarily super exciting. They are, however, a great example of what Apple can do when it has full control over its hardware.
Ever since the Apple Silicon era began in 2020, we’ve seen Apple consistently release updates to (almost) all of its Mac models — something it simply couldn’t do when relying on Intel.
Are you planning to buy a new Mac this year? Let us know down in the comments. If you don’t want to wait for the M5 MacBook Air, you can save on the M4 model right now.
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