24 hours with the MacBook Air M5 — it's already faster than the M4 MacBook Air

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It's early days in the life of the MacBook Air M5, which Apple unveiled this week along with a new iPhone 17e, a new MacBook Pro, and that wild MacBook Neo, but I can now confirm that it is faster than the MacBook Air M4, one of our favorite laptops.

Granted, I've run just one set of test moments after unboxing and updating the laptop to macOS Tahoe 26.3.1, but it was enough to prove that even in the more mainstream and ultra-popular MacBook Air, the M5 delivers.

After installing Geekbench 6.6 on both the new 13-inch MacBook Air M5 (in Starlight finish) and my 13-inch MacBook Air M4 (in Sky Blue), I ran the core CPU benchmark in a side-by-side ...