Apple MacBook Air 15-inch (M5) review

Full review

The 15-inch MacBook Air is the laptop we would recommend to most people with a premium budget. It takes everything that makes the 13-inch Air popular, a silent fanless design, a slim aluminium body and long battery life, and adds a much roomier 15.3-inch screen that is better for side-by-side windows and spreadsheets.

Apple's M5 chip has ten CPU cores and a ten-core GPU on this model, which is more than enough for office work, photo editing, coding and even light video editing. Memory now starts at 16GB and storage at 512GB, so the base model is no longer a false economy. Apple claims up to 18 hours of video streaming from the 66.5 Wh battery.

The screen is a sharp 2880 x 1864 panel at 500 nits, and the six-speaker system sounds full for such a thin laptop. You get a 12MP Center Stage webcam that keeps you in frame on calls, Wi-Fi 7 via Apple's own N1 chip, two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a MagSafe charger.

The main limitations are a 60Hz refresh rate, which looks less smooth than 120Hz rivals, and only two USB-C ports. If you do not need the larger screen, the 13-inch M5 Air is on our AI laptops page.