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"it has no annoying fans"

I beg to differ ;)

> You can maybe get a cheaper Windows laptop but it will be terrible in almost everything

It will be worse at almost everything, except running my preferred OS (Linux). Being able to upgrade/repair RAM, storage and battery at home is quite a perk too.

> I wish it was different

Amen to that, my keyboard on my m1 air recently failed. I was horrified to find out it is literally riveted to the frame. I got this close to buying a new one. Something annoyed me about this perfectly good laptop being rendered compltely useless and I ended up buying a replacement keyboard, ripping out the old one and shimming this one with paper. Its not perfect but here I am typing from it.

But you are 100% right, there is just nothing better on the market. The gap is so big.

If only it didn't have to run OSX.

If this one is anything like the previous ones, ThinkPad is still beating it in the keyboard department.

Plus you get x86_64 and vendor support for Linux.

X13 is probably the best equivalent in Lenovo's line.

you forgot to mention the trackpad. MUCH nicer than the competitor trackpads. especially if you use some of the advanced gestures (some are hidden in accessibility settings).

> very good speakers

All of the above is true but this, actually, is not entirely: they use a lot of DSP. If you try the same speakers with regular Fedora Asahi with no DSP profile (i.e. vanilla sound), they're very mediocre and do not handle bass well. So, like with many aspects of Apple hardware, this is an example of their software/firmware complimenting the hardware.

- thermal throttling under sustained heavy load, though apparently there is the possibility to add thermal pads to get rid of throttling, probably at the expense of comfort

- no Linux support

Otherwise I agree, it is a wonderful machine. I'd replace my crappy thinkpad if I could.

My 2014 Air is still going strong for light web browsing and terminal use.

Why the restriction to laptops? I don't get why prosumers would marry themselves 24/7 to a single portable device, when their conflicting requirements vary by task and circumstances: portability, high performance, low energy usage, and low noise aren't permanent requirements.

Sure, there's no single device that has Apple's blend of attributes, but who need that in this age of VMs and broadband Internet? My 32-core HEDT workstation outperforms anything Apple branded. I have a Chromebook when I need to be unplugged (<10% or the time)

Fully agree. I used to have a company issued MBP M3 Pro, and when I switched roles I got myself base M4 Air. Can't complain at all in the past year, I do feel throttling at times when running longer tasks, but for 99% of the time I don't feel I need anything better.

And I do work as a software developer, so anyone doing lighter usage not in this camp will feel the same.

M5 Air should be pretty much the same.

I prefer the Dell Rugged line or Thinkpads, since a single water droplet on the keyboard is enough to kill this laptop.

Plus a touch pad that uses all available space and allows clicks on any part of the touchpad surface.

> no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff all the time

MacOS absolutely has annoyances, ads, and broken stuff all the time.

When macOS shows an ad, it is sometimes harder to get rid of or disable than the ads built into Windows. For example, the ads to upgrade iCloud to a paid account.

I regularly run into bugs in macOS, both visual/cosmetic and functional, some of which have existed for multiple major versions with no fix.

How do you know there's no PWM flicker? Even my M3 Pro with its supposed 10khz backlight burns my eyes, I had to get rid of it. Is this display not oled?

Is it easy to install linux on them?

Yup. This a 1TB disk (how I’d configure it) and max out the ram is what I’d get.

I have an M4 air. It’s a nice machine, but I do miss the non-reflective screen of my earlier Asus zenbook (similar size, weight, fanless, decent ergonomics, matte screen, but bog slow).

It seems the M5 air still has non non-reflective screen option, which is very unfortunate.

Even though I'm done with apple, every time I use a non-apple laptop I think "this is a shit trackpad".

Apple makes great hardware. I kind of knew this when I was 12 and I had an Apple IIc. I'm 52 now.

Can I just lean on my cane for a second, and say that the first machine I connected to a network had 256KB RAM, and I considered myself lucky to have so much. My 150 baud modem downloaded text slower than I could read it.

I know how we got to these large numbers. Shit, I helped build the road. It still blows my brains out.

Lets be real, the fact that the Air is good for developers is.. honestly, great.

But these devices are meant for home users.

Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.

The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.

This is also just the direction that AI is taking us, even for people who wouldn't describe themselves as traditional developers.

Setting aside on-device LLMs, one needs RAM and disk space just for the multiple isolated Claude Cowork etc. VMs that will increasingly become part of people's everyday lives.

And when it's easier than ever to create an Electron app, everything's going to have an Electron app, with all the RAM/disk overhead that entails. And of course, nobody's asking their agents "optimize the resource usage of the app I made last week" - they're moving on to the next feature or project.

I suppose the demoscene will always be there, for those of us who increasingly need a refuge from ram-flation.

I'm excited about this. The previous generation base model 15" Air was good enough for our company to make it the default computer for everyone. Previously we were giving out base model MBP's. And they're $1000 cheaper.

Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.

Where does it stop? Of course having a bit more room does not hurt, but my view is that if 256GB was not enough for you, 512GB wouldn't be either.

To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps that consume tens of GBs of RAM on a whim (looking at you Firefox, I've been impressed with how efficient and stable the Helium browser has been for me). If you are a developer, engineer for efficient use of RAM and storage.

Like I said, 16gb RAM and 512GB storage minimum is nice, but if the fundamental issues that contribute to massive and wasteful use of resources on our machines are not addressed, nothing will be enough.

I have an M3 8gb air and it' mostly fine, unless I have a node server running or similar. Otherwise it's not very different to my M4 16gb iMac

I've no idea what the storage is on either of them, I've never looked. The days of needing storage are behind me, personally

I have a 16GB/512GB Air M1 (2020) because I knew I would need the extra space but this really makes me happy. A new Air, higher headroom, M5, is awesome. It’s not a MBP but it’s good enough for 95% of the daily stuff. If you aren’t running local agents this would be amazing.

Even with the $100 price bump, I think this is a win. 16/512 is a very nice base spec on Mac.

I bought a ThinkPad X1. Had to send it back for repairs three times in the first year, including a complete motherboard replacement, and it died again immediately after the warranty expired. Been a $2800 door stop since then. The case is flimsy plastic that gets beat to crap easily. The trackpad is over-sensitive in all the wrong ways which makes it hard to use as an actual laptop. Plus it's weaker and slower than an Air. Also unbearably loud and unbearably hot.

I don't like Apple as a company and I don't particularly like MacOS, but no one except Apple makes a laptop worth a damn.

The Air is going to run laps around the X1, in literally every benchmark you can come up with besides "its not open source". I have that same processor in a much bulkier thinkpad and it thermal throttles instantly doing basic office multi-tasking, with the fan running constantly.

Also its made out of metal.

It has always been like this. Apple's signature for their laptops is their aluminium body and people seem to like it.

> The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon

And costs ~800 more for 16Gb/512 with a slower CPU and worse battery life.

As someone who spends his life on the road with a laptop, I strongly feel that anything that works for you under 3lbs is the sweet spot. The difference between 2.2 and 2.7lbs is miniscule in the grand scheme of my backpack.

If anybody else wondered about figures:

13.6 inch 2560x1664 screen, 1.23kg (13" Mac)

14.0 inch 1920x1200 screen, 0.98kg (14" Thinkpad)

But then you'd have to have a plasticky thinkpad with half the screen resolution...

I really like my X1 Carbon gen 7, aside from the bizarre Ethernet "port" (it has built-in Ethernet, but they didn't have room for RJ45, so instead of just telling you to buy a USB one it's on a dongle that blocks one of its two USB-C ports when plugged in, eliminating the advantage of "doesn't use a USB port"). But aside from fantastic Linux support, it's got little to recommend it over a similar-vintage MBA, which has a much better look and feel.

Same here. If the rumored A18 Pro MacBook stays under 1kg, it would be very compelling.

Regarding lightweight laptops, the Fujitsu FMV Note U series (14-inch) weighs only 634g-917g with Arrow Lake 255H and a replaceable battery.

i run fedora and arch on my m2 air, via the UTM app which wraps Apple Silicon hypervisor, and it's _fantastic_.

Is Linux normally heavier?

I'm in the same boat and finding it disappointing.

For people saying this machine is so much faster, I don't care. My situation isn't the norm, but we're on HN. I have a powerful desktop that's my main compute machine and my laptop is a terminal. I need a web browser, whatever corporate shovelware I need, and a ssh connection (and tailscale). If I wanted to do real work locally I wouldn't be getting an Air.

While realizing I'm not the typical user, it's not like the typical Air user needs much compute anyways. The general public just uses web browsers.

Though one thing I'd love is if they could add just a little distance between the keyboard and screen so my screen doesn't get so dirty constantly... doesn't anyone use lotion at Apple?

What I actually like about Apple products is the heft. They feel premium and the heaviness contributes a lot to the premium feel.

I tried a ThinkPad X1 Carbon as well, it felt like a toy.

It seems like there are a decent number of people finding Asahi stable enough for regular use: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1quko4w/how_via...

I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.

As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.

Good news, intel panther lake (and the laptops they come in) are on par with M5 macbooks in almost every way.

This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.

The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).

Same. I was on macOS for work for about 3 years. Never gelled with me.

I was on an M2 Macbook Pro with Asahi and it was great. It's really hard to fault Apple's hardware for most use cases.

I'm currently on a Strix Halo laptop (HP Zbook), which is about as expensive, and the hardware is great, but power efficiency and build quality lag leagues behind by Apple. A 4000 euro laptop still feels like a cheap toy.

I believe they'll enable it, actually, fairly soon. With this hardware at these prices, if they offered BootCamp again for Linux and Windows, they'd basically own the market almost overnight. Considering they have long-term contracts on RAM and SSDs and that they steep margin on their Mac hardware, there is hardly any reason to not make money off of those who actually wouldn't buy Mac hardware otherwise. Plus, there's a chance they'll also buy AirPods, mouse, keyboard, etc.

Then support companies like Tuxedo, System 76, Dell, Asus,....

The only time Apple supported first class Linux on their consumer hardware was with MkLinux, and that was when everything was going down in flames and they needed to survive somehow.

No support needed. Run Linux in a VM. Devices are limited, and you can't save/restore your state, but there's no real performance hit: my code runs faster on macOS(VM(Linux)) than macOS.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Buy the mac, try Linux in an hour, take it back if you don't like it.

Agreed - I just can't get excited about the world's fastest CPU core running on the world's most locked-down and developer-unfriendly OS.

Perhaps macOS would suffice?

I would normally strongly agree, I don't like Apple as a company - for example the Apple store and Patreon 30 % tax https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46801419 Their policies overall.

However there is no comparable laptop hardware in the non-Apple world. Even if I wanted to pay double, there is no usable fanless high-quality quick laptop. Very sadly. The Air is just too good for the money and the competition too bloody incompetent and bad.

> you are locked into apple stores because they refuse competition

I don't follow this one. You can buy Apple hardware from other retailers. You can download software, out of the box, from places other than the Mac App Store.

> I make it clear it's not about specs, it's not about UI, its about the fact that apple makes the world actively worse so they can sell you a better alternative.

I like the UI. What do you think they making worse?

what are you poor? If you need to repair something its probably junked anyway, I used to work at geeksquad. Most common "repairs" people were bringing laptops in for were liquid spills. Take a quick hike back to the computer section.

I have 2 thinkpads, and one of them is better in every aspect - except that the inferior one has it's 2 USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, while the other one has both ports on the same side. Being able to plug in the charger from either side is really great, will definitely look for that in a future laptop.

iPhone processor? Should be interesting to see how performance is.

The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more.

PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).

I retired my M1 MacBook Air last year, really out of power greed. I wanted to play with local LLMs (lol).

I seriously never had issues with my m1 in my workloads. Dev stuff, docker, etc. editing 30min 4k GoPro videos. I probably would these days with rust dev stacked in there but yeah. Can’t agree more, they’re an amazing value.

This laptop should be good enough for 90%+ of all users out there for 5-10 years

I don't get it either. I've rolled out well over a hundred of these in a higher education setting and I have never had one have a hardware issue or needed to retire it other than wanton damage. I still have a ton of M1s in circulation and they are great still. I had to just replace a Dell with only 2.5 years of service, they tend to fall apart.

The MB Air M line is a personal contender for best product of all time: Fantastic performance without fans, amazing battery life, high res display and build quality at that price point.

When the M1 came out it was quite frankly unbelievable. And, even after all these years, I still don't see who would beat it across those dimensions.

> The MBA is an amazing value, and appears to have only gotten slightly cheaper.

Looks to me like the base model went up by $100, no?

The whining is just whining. It's a fine laptop, but it's not significantly improved from the one they shipped a year ago. Add to that the fact that laptops as a whole are well on the way down their commoditization slope and the general HN desire to cheer about Great New Apple Devices, this is for sure a backwards step.

>I'm not sure why the negative tone in this thread.

Which negative tone? 90% the mainline comments I see are positive.

The base M1 was 256gb 8gb ram for 999usd. Thats why yours was 1399eur.

Each Air generations gets slight upgrade and also now got 100usd price increase.

That was not a base machine in 2020

M5 is almost 2x the single core performance of the M1 Max. You would notice that things are faster.

Noted, I will inform Tim Cook.

The M4 MacBook Air (16gb, 1TB) retailed for $1400 (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1884084-REG/apple_mba...).

The M5 equivalent is now $1300. 1TB requires the CPU upgrade.

Yes, previously the 512GB Air was $1200, now it's $1100.

Apple hasn't suddenly stopped being Apple. They strongly differentiate the boundaries of their product lines and have never let use case leakage spread across their product lines.

I tremble to think at the cost of 1TB of ram in an apple laptop.

I'm pretty sure that the market for notebooks with more than 128GB memory at Apples prices is rather small.

It was the M3 Ultra that had that much RAM capacity, not the Pro or the Max.

It is disappointing they didn't up it to at least 256GB on the laptops, but we'll have to wait for the next iteration of the studio to see if they'll give us 1TB unified memory.

Yep, seems like an expected spec bump. M4 to M5, base storage bumped from 256GB to 512GB, price increased by $100.

I went for an M4 Max, 128GB RAM and 2TB storage. My thinking is that we've crossed the rubicon of expecting tech to be orders of magnitudes faster a decade out. It won't be.

I expect this MacBook Pro (2024) to last a decade and inflation to eat away at value of cost/benefit of future purchases so I got the best one I could possibly afford. Meaning whatever entry level Apple laptop is available in 2034 will be only a small multiple faster than than my top of line 2024 one. I could be wrong as well but that's the dice roll.

> why did I pay

Indeed, why did you? Didn't you read product specs for a device that costs nearly 2-and-a-half grand?

The thing with storage is you pay for it immediately-but you get zero value from it until you cross the smaller size boundary.

When my 1TB had about 400GB on it, the extra space "was worthless" - but now it's useful (though I have my suspicions that most of the extra space is being taken up by cloud caches).

I paid for an M1 Max when it came out. It was like $4500 AUD at the time.

I mean its still a decent machine, but man, I can get an M5 now for just over half the price...

(oh dang that was like nearly 5 years ago now)

and MacStudio!

Yeah not sure if it's so necessary.

Everyone carries their phone. Power users (i.e. nomads who need connectivity in many different places) have lots of unlimited data plans available that are modestly priced (I've travelled asia the last few months and used e-sims for like $10 a month in each country). And that's a niche group, but even they have their phone as a hotspot. Downside is that it burns battery, but if you're sitting somewhere for any length of time that battery would matter, just plugging-in basically resolves that.

The vast majority of us are either at home, work, friends/family or a rotating set of a few local cafe's, all of which are in our wifi auto-connect list, and have their phone hotspot for the rare occasion there is no wifi.

Then for the powerusers you could just buy a mobile hotspot device as well, basically what your phone does but it's just connectivity + battery.

It's not as cheap a part as you'd think, estimates range between $100 and $300 extra per laptop, even though it seems like a niche thing for which alternatives at lower/similar price points (phone/dedicated device) already exist. So I'm not sure we're going to see it anytime soon. Maybe with Apple making its own modems now it'll happen in a few years. Previously it'd just make for a more expensive device for something few users need (and shipping cheap devices to everyone is a priority with their service business of $100b in 2025, more than Tesla with a market cap of 1 trillion)

I don't think that would be very popular considering how easy it is to hotspot to your phone. Their watches only offer cellular because they're frequently used away from a phone.

I would love it though if they did, but it would probably require a data-only esim.

When they don't have to pay a percentage of sales price as royalty to Qualcomm.

Because of the integration between the iPhone and the Mac it is extremely easy to tether your Mac to your phone. Like three clicks easy. Why would anyone want to pay for another data plan?

All of the rumors pointed that this time in the refresh cycle is a spec bump and if they ever were going to make a Mac with cellular it would be the end of the year with the Macbook Pro redesign.

Yeah that would be nice. My thinking is that they don't want to cannibalize ipad sales.

The rumours are that this is coming later this year with the M6 generation (along with OLED touch screens).

No. Apple needs reasons for the iPad to exist.

Even a PCMCIA slot would help! ;)

why?

Agreed. That's my upgrade cue. Cellular iPad changed me.

Mobile hotspot is clunky and unreliable still. I don't see that changing in the next 5-10 years.

laptops seem kinda solved now? for every cpu vendor and every os theres now a great option that just, works, so everyone can just use what they like and not be at a disadvantage due to not knowing the latest developements in the space, or due to habitual preference. Good type of boring

I'll upgrade my M1 MBA when they do. I remember my Intel MBP running noticeably hotter when plugged in on one side vs the other, so maybe it's trickier than it seems.

Because the Pro costs more.

With the MagSafe charging port I never worry about it - if the cord runs behind the laptop and I kick it, nothing bad happens.

I mean I get it - it's slightly annoying to need an extra 18" of charging cable length but at the end of the day tradeoffs for a smaller, cheaper, lighter machine have to exist.

Production question, then, for those who know about these things: how far ahead would Apple have locked in their prices for buying RAM for this line, for the units that are part of the initial release?

Yeah and also they still want to get at least some sales on the mac studios and mac pros with ultra chips, 256gb m5 max wouldve straight up killed both of those products.

We can have nice things but nobody is going to hurt themselves to give out things that are the very best possible, theres probably a lesson in this

The MacBook Pro M5 came out about six months ago[0]. The MBPs M5 Pro and M5 Max were released today also[1].

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...

Yep, they have been on a 12 month cadence each March for the last two years. The M1 (Nov '20) and M2 (Jul '22) lasted 20 months each.

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Air

What is the importance of going to a store and buying one? If you live in any major metro you can just go to any big box retailer, or a microcenter if you have one, and buy any other brand’s laptop.

But is it really a price bump? Yesterday the 512GB M4 Air was $1200, now the 512GB M5 Air is $1100, at least apples to apples.

Kinda is, kinda isn't.

If Apple introduces a $799 or $899 'value' MacBook (like iPad / iPad Air / iPad Pro lineup), they could say it's $300 off the MacBook Air's price now, with that $100 bump.

(I'm still surprised Apple isn't bumping their prices more due to RAM pricing, but maybe they're absorbing a little bit of their margins to potentially increase market share.)

M5 is not an incremental upgrade, it has MTE.