Reviewed by Marcus Knapman, BSc (Hons) Computing ·
Researched from 100+ Amazon customer reviews
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Is there anything left to say about a MacBook Air? Apple has been refining this recipe for years, and the formula is simple: thin, quiet, fast enough, and impossible to be embarrassed by in a coffee shop. The 15-inch Apple MacBook Air with the M5 chip sticks to that formula, but it does something I rather like. It gives you the big screen without the bulk and fan noise of a MacBook Pro.
I haven't had one on my desk for a month, so I won't pretend otherwise. What I've done is pore over the spec sheet, read through what buyers are saying, and weigh it against what this thing costs. At £1,199.97, it lands in an interesting place: not cheap, but with 16GB of memory and 512GB of storage as the starting point, you're not being nickel-and-dimed for the basics.
My bottom line, before you read another word: if you want a large, light, quiet laptop for work, study and general creative stuff, this is about as easy a recommendation as Apple makes. If you edit 4K video for a living or you're on a tight budget, read on, because there are caveats worth knowing about.
The smaller Air is lovely, but spend a day working on it with two windows side by side and you start to feel cramped. The 15.3-inch Liquid Retina display fixes that. Apple quotes support for 1 billion colours, and in practice that means photos look rich, text is crisp, and you can have a document and a browser open without constantly shuffling windows around.
It also changes how the laptop feels on a train table or a sofa arm. You get a proper canvas, which matters if you spend your days in spreadsheets or edit photos on the move. The trade-off is obvious: it's a bigger machine than the 13-inch, and if your bag is already full, you'll notice.
Anyone who has bought a laptop in the past decade will know the dance. The headline price looks reasonable, then you realise the base model has barely enough memory to run a browser with a dozen tabs. Here, 16GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD are the starting configuration. That takes away most of the upsell pressure.
The M5 chip itself is built around a faster CPU, a next-generation GPU with Neural Accelerators, and a Neural Engine for AI tasks. For everyday multitasking, which is what most people will do, the spec sheet suggests it should feel smooth and responsive. I'd expect it to shrug off Office, Lightroom, a heap of Chrome tabs and a video call all at once without so much as a stutter.
Apple quotes up to 18 hours of battery life. As with every manufacturer figure, treat it as a best case rather than a promise. Brightness, video calls and heavy apps will chip away at it. Still, the broader point stands: this is a laptop you can reasonably take to a full day of meetings or lectures without hunting for a socket. Buyers of previous Airs tend to rave about this more than anything else, and I see no reason why the M5 version would break the pattern.
When you do need to charge, you've got MagSafe, which frees up both Thunderbolt 4 ports. That's a small thing until you're plugging in a monitor and a drive at the same time.
Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, MagSafe and a headphone jack. That's it. No SD card slot, no HDMI, no USB-A. If you're a photographer or you present a lot, you'll be buying a dongle or a hub, and that's an annoyance at this price. On the plus side, it supports up to two external displays, and the Apple N1 chip brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, so the wireless side is as future-proofed as you could ask for.
The 12MP Centre Stage camera keeps you in frame as you move, and Desk View lets you share a top-down shot of your workspace, which is handy for teachers or anyone showing off a sketch. Add the three-mic array and a six-speaker system with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos, and this is a laptop you can take calls and watch a film on without reaching for headphones. For a thin machine, that's rare.
Apple is pushing the AI angle hard, and the M5 is clearly designed with it in mind. Apple Intelligence handles writing help and everyday tasks, with privacy protections Apple says keep your data away from everyone, itself included. I'd treat that as a nice extra rather than a reason to spend over a grand. The features will evolve, and the hardware is clearly ready, but the everyday appeal of this laptop is the screen, the battery and the silence.
Price is the obvious one. £1,199.97 is a lot of money, and there are Windows laptops with more ports and similar screens for less. You're paying for macOS, the build and the ecosystem, and whether that's worth it depends on you. The lack of ports is the other bugbear, and as a thin-and-light machine, it isn't built for sustained heavy workloads like long video renders, where a Pro with active cooling would hold up better.
The Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M5 is the one I'd point most people to if they want a big screen without the Pro price or weight. Buy it for study, work, photo editing and everyday life. Skip it if you need lots of ports, or if you're doing heavy video work all day, where a MacBook Pro is the better tool.
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