M5 MacBook Air in Canada: Price Up $100 but Now Starts With 512GB Storage

Apple has announced an updated MacBook Air lineup featuring the new M5 processor on Tuesday morning, part of a flurry of new product announcements via press release. This update marks a significant jump in technical specifications for the company’s entry level laptop. The 13 inch and 15 inch models now start with 512GB of storage. This is twice the capacity of the previous base model.

The M5 chip includes a 10 core CPU and up to a 10 core GPU. It features a new Neural Accelerator in every core to improve AI performance. Apple claims the M5 is up to 4x faster for AI tasks compared to the M4. It is also up to 9.5x faster than the original M1 model.

Other hardware upgrades include the new N1 wireless chip. This brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support to the MacBook Air for the first time. The internal SSD is also twice as fast as the previous generation. This should result in quicker file transfers and app launches.

“The new MacBook Air with M5 brings incredible performance and even more capability to the world’s most popular laptop,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

The laptops retain the same thin aluminum design and 18 hour battery life. They are available in four colours: sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver.

Apple says the internal SSD is also now 2x as fast, plus you can get up to 4TB of storage for the first time with a MacBook Air.

Pre-orders begin tomorrow, March 4. The devices will be available in stores starting Wednesday, March 11. The 13 inch model starts at $1,499 CAD (a $100 price increase versus M4) with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD (with 10-core CPU/8-core GPU), while the 15 inch model starts at $1,799 CAD ($100 price increase) with the same RAM and storage, but with a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU. It used to cost $270 to upgrade from 256GB to 512GB SSD, and now the solid state drive is twice as fast. Is that worth it?