It’s hard not to love the MacBook Air. It’s been Apple’s best consumer MacBook for a while now, certainly since it started using M-chips, offering a good chunk of what makes the MacBook Pro great at a much lower price. It’s been recently updated to use the latest M processor, the M5, and can be found with a decent amount of RAM and storage too, though the entry-level model isn’t to be ignored.
The MacBook Air M5 makes the ideal choice for students going back to school or college, can turn its hand to many creative applications, and can play games too thanks to the M5 chip’s enhanced GPU cores. It’s even better value thanks to this deal running on Amazon right now, which knocks up to 12% off the price.
I’ve used a variety of Airs over the years, starting with an 11in Core i7 model that had the very first version of Thunderbolt on board, and they’ve been universally excellent. The very first Air, which launched way back in 2008 when Steve Jobs pulled one out of an envelope on-stage, could be a bit underpowered thanks to a custom chipset that was made to be 40% smaller than the usual package, and only had a single USB port. It was the laptop that saw Apple ditch the DVD drive from its machines, and was the first Mac with an optional SSD.
It’s made great strides since then, and the M5 version is possibly the best Mac for most people in the current range. While many may wax lyrical about the MacBook Neo – which is an excellent laptop capable of great things and available at a remarkable price – it’s still a low-end product that utilises a CPU from last year’s iPhone, while the M5 is the current pinnacle of Apple Silicon engineering. The Air also comes with the things you’ll be looking for as a creative user of the laptop, with Thunderbolt 4 ports, the ability to spec extra memory and storage, and a dedicated charging port to keep the others free.
The sky’s the limit
The M5 model comes in a range of colours, the star of which is the Sky Blue option. It’s steely, professional-looking, and looks great whenever you pull it out to use.
You can find 12% off the price of the M5 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD on Amazon right now, but perhaps more interesting is 10% off the cost of one with 24GB of RAM and the 1TB drive. This is a laptop that will potentially last for years, will make mincemeat out of image editing and graphic design, and will even turn its hand to video editing with layers of effects. If you’re a roving camera operator, drone pilot, action cam extreme sports fanatic or just someone who likes to travel light, the MacBook Air is a useful thing to slide into the laptop pocket of your bag.