0:00 This video is sponsored by Hyper. This is the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air. And if you've seen an Air over the last three or four years, this might seem like another boring update. The design is the same. You've got the same screen, same ports, and even in person. It's indistinguishable from the past three generations. But underneath all of that, there are some meaningful upgrades in here. But the performance story is a bit more complicated than I expected. using it for the past week, I've had no doubts about whether the M5 Air is a good laptop. It definitely is, but I want to get into not only what makes this a good laptop and what changes were made, but also if those changes were the right ones to make and where the Air could be
0:46 better. I've always thought the MacBook Air was the best MacBook for most people because you get a decent amount of performance in a nice small package with a more digestible price over the Pro lineup. And especially this year, I think there's even more potential for this to have more value per dollar. So, let's get into why that is. In terms of build quality, the Air is very hard to beat. It's got a full aluminum housing that feels very premium and minimal and is made up of great components from the hinges to the force touch trackpad and the keyboard. Where the model that I have here is the 15-in version. I usually buy the 13-in air because I find it much more portable, but I wanted to switch things up a little this year and
1:32 get the 15 for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, when I was on the buy page, I noticed the 13-in configuration that I usually get is only a h 100red bucks USD less than the 15-in with the same specs. And using 13 and 14in screens for these reviews and just general usage for things like video editing or coding can be a bit of a pain. I thought this might help a bit in that regard. And you do get some upgrades with the speakers and the battery that I'll get into in a bit. But even at 15 in, it's still only 11.5 mm thick and is just a hair lighter than the 14-in Pro model at 3.3 lb. That makes it quite portable in terms of packing it around, although it can definitely be a bit harder to place in tight spaces, like on the edge of a
2:18 table or say if you were using it on a flight. That's where I would probably lean towards using the 13-in. But regardless of which size you choose, again, the looks haven't changed at all here with the same four color options. The model that I have here is silver. Previous to this, I'd had all three other color options, which are fine, but like I mentioned last week, I do wish Apple would give us some lighter keyboard options like the Neo has, especially on the Air. I find the black keys don't look great against the Starlight and sky blue options, and it would look a lot better against lighter keys. I think the Pro does a good job at masking that in silver with a whole keyboard area turned black. And while the build quality is fantastic here, there is nothing new design-wise outside
3:04 one very minor thing. The only real visible change this generation were the key legends, changing from words to icons on some keys. And the display is exactly the same in here as well, which I'm not super keen on. That is a 15.3 in 2880 by864 liquid retina display that still runs at the same 60 Hz with slightly over 500 nits peak brightness. And don't get me wrong, the picture itself is still great. If you're watching content on here, everything looks good, the colors pop, and you get about a 1500 to1 contrast ratio, which is outstanding for an IPS panel. It's also very color accurate, covering just under 97% of the P3 gamut. So any color
3:50 critical work is totally doable on here. But my issue is more so to do with everything else that's out there these days. You can find laptops competitively priced with the Air that have OLED screens with 120 Hz and better brightness and HDR specs that have just as good of color accuracy and side by side look much better. Overall, the Air is still quite nice, but I think this is one thing that I would like to see get upgraded in the next generation. With realworld use though, I have really liked having the extra screen real estate while working in any apps that have a lot of UI panels, and it is much nicer to watch content on here over the 13-in. Not just because the screen is bigger, but you get a six speakeraker sound system versus four speakers in the
4:35 13-in. I find the audio is just a bit more full sounding where the 13-in sounds slightly flatter. Uh, surprisingly, it doesn't seem to get any louder, but it still far exceeds the audio on almost every other laptop out there except for the MacBook Pro. Now, if you would rather use your own monitor and speakers with the Air at a desk, it will support up to two 6K monitors at 60 Hz or more importantly 5K at 120 Hz. So, this will support the new Studio XDR display if you feel like spending twice the price of this laptop on a monitor. I've just been using it with my 6K LG Ultra Fine, and it's ran without any issues, although you do still have a severe lack of ports on the Air. This is another thing that I would like to see
5:21 get upgraded on the Air, at least on the 15-in model. You still only have two USBC ports on the left side with a MagSafe connector and a headphone jack on the other. And I think there is ample space to at least add one more USBC port to the right side. Having another port on the other side not only gives you more flexibility, but say if you're at a desk where a cable will only reach to one side, you don't have to fumble around trying to get it to work, especially on a larger laptop like this. The Air also kept the Thunderbolt 4 spec, so no Thunderbolt 5 that you get with a Pro or Max chips, but I'm mostly fine with that. There are very few instances that you notice the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and 5 outside of connecting monitors with super high
6:06 frame rates and resolutions. I know even though my external SSD runs faster on my Pro machines, I don't actually notice the slower speeds running off the air most of the time. Using this at my desk, it might not look like it, but I run most of my workflow from an external drive which is now hidden with this HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 dock. I have actually been having trouble with my external enclosure disconnecting lately. So rather than dealing with that, I can just mount the SSD right in the built-in NVME slot inside this dock with a solid aluminum heat sink that keeps things cool, and I actually get better drive speeds out of it as well. This dock does run at Thunderbolt 5 with up to 120 Gbits per second, although it
6:51 is backwards compatible with the Air on Thunderbolt 4, and it gives you a total of 10 ports. There's four Thunderbolt 5 ports, four USBA ports, 2.5 gig Ethernet, and a headphone jack. And I love that one of those Thunderbolt ports is front-facing, which you almost never see on these. It also supports triple 4K displays at 144 hertz or one single 8K at 144, delivers up to 140 watts of power, and runs your whole setup off one cable, which is a big deal on a machine without a lot of ports. And I will have a link below if you want to check it out. But let's get into what's inside the M5 Air because this is where the biggest changes are. This model is the base 15in Air. So, you get an M5 chip
7:39 with a 10 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and a 512 gig SSD. And there are some really big updates on paper. The SSD speed is twice as fast as it was in the M4 Air with sustained speeds of over 6,000 megabytes per second, which is even faster than my M3 Ultramax Studio. CPU benchmarks are between 10 and 20% better than the previous generation. And GPU performance also has roughly the same bump as well, but that doesn't tell the whole story here. On paper, performance is going to give you some context for how good a chip is compared to another, but it can be misleading and is no substitute for real world use. For lighter use cases, any M series chip
8:25 will feel roughly the same. If all you're doing is using this casually for answering emails, web browsing, watching content, or complaining about your neighbors in your local Facebook group, the Air isn't going to feel much different performance-wise over something like the MacBook Neo. Even for things like photo editing or graphic design, provided you're not opening up a bunch of enormous files at once, the M5 Air has virtually no lag. I've been working with mock-ups and editing photos for the website that I've been working on, and it's been fantastic. There are a few articles written up and ready to post for that site. So, I've also been trying to get this website up and running on here, which is basically a simple setup with WordPress on Docker and a React front end running locally.
9:11 And even coding and building that have been super smooth with quick compile times. That's similar with mobile development. You definitely feel less cramped in Xcode with more room on the screen for all the different panels and smaller projects run and build just fine, but it's when you start ramping up system usage where some weird things start happening. Running Xcode benchmark to see what this would be like for bigger builds, things came out as you would expect with build times being about 8 to 10% better than the M4 Air. The M5 in the base MacBook Pro was a whopping 24% better with the same chip, which is largely because that has a fan and the Air doesn't, but that's still a pretty big difference and it comes through even more while video editing. The actual process of video editing is
9:58 completely fine. Uh, working on these videos, it doesn't really feel much different at all from the ProLevel chip that I looked at last week. Everything is responsive and quick, but it's when I export the video that the results don't come out quite as expected. Rendering out a 14-minute 4K video on the M5 Air took 23 minutes, which honestly kind of confused me. The M4 Air only took 12 minutes, and it seemed like there was no way the same project could take twice as long, but every single time I tested it, I got the same results. I double checked that the projects were identical, but as I was testing, I was also monitoring the temperature of each machine. And for whatever reason, the M5 Air does seem to be throttling a lot sooner than the M4
10:44 Air, even with it having a bigger chassis, which is pretty strange. If exporting video is a big part of your workflow, it's worth noting. But I also want to be clear, this seems to be specific to sustained video rendering and doesn't reflect how the machine feels to use daytoday or in most other demanding tasks. For instance, in Blender, rendering out a demanding scene is actually over 2 minutes faster on the M5 Air over the M4 Air and can move around small to medium-sized projects just fine. I actually spent all of last Sunday working on a 3D model in Fusion. And the only time it really bogged down at all was when I had sketches with a whole bunch of constraints where I would occasionally get the odd beach ball for a few seconds. But everything else was
11:31 smooth as butter and the battery life was outstanding where I got well over a full day of use doing things like this. The 15-in does have a much larger battery than the 13-in at 66 W hours versus 53. And I was curious if it would last a bit longer, but because you have to power the bigger screen. I found it's not a whole lot different than the 13-in, but it's still pretty great nonetheless. Like I said, I can get well over a full day doing semi-demanding things, and mixed usage seems to last about 12 to 13 hours. It will last longer than that if all you're doing is watching content or web browsing. And although video exports do take a lot longer on here, the battery draw while rendering is far lower than the Pro
12:16 chip, only draining about 12% while the M5 Pro was about double that. If you really ramp up usage with things like Blender or anything that is constantly stressing out the chipset, the battery can drain in around 4 hours or so, but it does charge up pretty quickly where you can get a 0 to 50% charge in roughly a half hour or it will take a couple hours to go to the full 100. You will need to use a 70watt or higher charger to get the fastest charging speed out of the M5 Air rather than the 40 W dynamic power adapter with 60 watts max output that is included in the box, which is a tad slower, but absolutely no complaints on that front and none with wireless connectivity either, which is one of the bigger upgrades this generation. Just
13:04 like the M5 Pro MacBook Pro, the M5 Air has the new N1 networking chip that's in most of Apple's new Pro devices. So, you get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 that have both worked really well for me. With Wi-Fi, I get about 100 megabits per second more over the M4 Air. And Bluetooth has been solid with absolutely no drops or issues at all. I actually think that the range might be a little bit longer on this 15-in model just due to the antenna placement internally, but wireless connectivity isn't something that I've had to worry about on Macs for years. It's really about the performance nuances and what you're getting for the price that are worth paying attention to here. When it comes down to it, I think Apple mostly made the right calls with
13:49 the M5 Air. The bumps to general performance and the wireless upgrades are things that you can actually feel, but the 60 Hz display is getting harder to ignore at this price, and the video export performance is a genuine consideration if that's a big part of your workflow. If you're on an M1 or an M2, this is a meaningful upgrade, but beyond that, I think I would likely hold off as any gains you get just don't really match value-wise. Still, if you need a new laptop, $1,200 for a 15-in machine this capable is still going to be the best laptop for most people. Just make sure that you know what you're getting and what you're not. With that said, if you guys have anything else that you feel like the Airline needs to
14:35 address in the next gen, please leave a comment down below. But that's all I've got for you today. If you want to see more techreated content or see how many Facebook groups you can have open in different tabs before the air finally crashes, please subscribe. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next upload.
