Apple Also Launches MacBook Air M5 with Higher Starting Price and Doubled Storage

The MacBook Air has been Apple's best-selling laptop for years running, and with good reason — it's thin, quiet, genuinely fast for most people's needs, and historically priced just low enough to feel accessible. The M5 version announced at Apple's March 2026 event keeps most of what made previous generations popular, but comes with two changes that will define how buyers react: a $100 price increase and double the default storage. Whether that trade-off feels fair depends a lot on who you are and what you were planning to buy.

Starting at $1,099, the MacBook Air M5 now costs the same as the newly announced MacBook Neo. That overlap is unusual for Apple, which typically keeps its product tiers cleanly separated by price. It suggests Apple is betting that the Air's fanless design, lighter weight, and brand recognition will do enough work to justify the comparison — and for a lot of buyers, that bet is probably correct.

The M5 Chip and What Four Times the AI Performance Actually Means

Apple's headline claim for the M5 is that it delivers up to four times the AI performance of the M4 generation. That's a significant jump, and it's driven by an upgraded Neural Engine that handles on-device machine learning tasks far more efficiently than its predecessor. In practical terms, this matters most for features like live transcription, real-time translation, on-device image editing with AI tools, and background processing tasks that would previously have required offloading to Apple's servers.

For everyday computing — browsing, writing, spreadsheets, video calls — the M4 Air was already fast enough that most users wouldn't feel constrained. The M5 pushes the ceiling higher, but the floor was already high. Where the generational leap becomes tangible is in creative and developer workflows that have started incorporating AI-assisted tools. If your work touches that space even occasionally, the M5's Neural Engine improvements are worth paying attention to.

512GB as the New Baseline

The move from 256GB to 512GB default storage is long overdue and arguably the most welcome change in this release. The 256GB base tier had become a genuine pain point — not because 256GB is unusable, but because the cost of upgrading storage on Apple silicon Macs is steep relative to the base price. Buyers who didn't want to pay for the upgrade were often left managing storage obsessively or relying heavily on external drives. Doubling the default removes that friction without requiring an extra configuration decision at checkout.

It also makes the $100 price increase easier to swallow. You're not just paying more for the same machine — you're getting meaningfully more usable storage out of the box. For students, remote workers, and light creative users who make up the Air's core audience, 512GB is a comfortable baseline that should last the machine's full lifespan without requiring cloud storage gymnastics.

Air vs. Neo: Who Should Buy Which

With both the MacBook Air M5 and MacBook Neo now starting at $1,099, Apple is essentially asking buyers to self-select based on what they value. The Air is lighter, runs without a fan, and suits anyone who wants a portable daily driver for communication, content consumption, and moderate creative work. The Neo, with its A18 Pro chip and Thunderbolt 5 ports, is aimed at people who push their machines harder and want sustained performance headroom under extended workloads.

The fanless design is the Air's most meaningful differentiator. In a quiet room, a machine that never spins up is noticeably more pleasant to work on. For writers, students, and anyone doing knowledge work rather than compute-heavy tasks, that matters more than benchmark numbers. The Neo will technically outperform the Air in sustained workloads — but if you're not running those workloads, you'll never see the difference.

Is the Price Increase Justified?

A $100 increase on a product this popular will always generate some pushback, and Apple knows that. But framing it purely as a price hike misses the context. The M4 Air at $999 shipped with 256GB. The M5 Air at $1,099 ships with 512GB and a substantially more capable AI processor. If you were going to configure the M4 with 512GB anyway — which many buyers did — the M5 is actually cheaper on a like-for-like basis. That's not spin; it's just math.

Where the price increase genuinely stings is for buyers who were fine with 256GB and just wanted a solid everyday laptop at the lowest Apple entry point. That option no longer exists at the $999 tier. Apple has effectively moved its floor up, which narrows the gap to Windows competition in a way the company hasn't had to worry about much until recently. It'll be worth watching whether that gap closes further with the next cycle.