The MacBook Air has always been the sensible choice – great battery, light enough to forget it’s in your bag. What’s never been done before is what’s making MacBook Pro owners a little embarrassed. Until now, apparently.
When Apple switched the M5 MacBook Air to PCIe 4.0 NAND flash, it was not only faster than its predecessor, but also faster than some M4 Pro MacBook Pro models.
Benchmark numbers that cause a stir
NotebookCheck’s hands-on test of the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test brings the numbers to the table:
| Model | Read (5GB) | Write (5GB) | vs. M5 Air (Read) | vs. M5 Air (writing) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MacBook Pro 14 M5 | 6,752.1 MB/s | 6,194.2 MB/s | +4.31% faster | −5.57% slower |
| MacBook Air 13 M5 | 6,473.4 MB/s | 6,558.6 MB/s | — | — |
| MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro | 5,401.3 MB/s | 6,713.2 MB/s | −19.85% slower | +2.30% faster |
| MacBook Air 15 M4 | 2,904.0 MB/s | 3,023.9 MB/s | −122.91% slower | −116.89% slower |
When it comes to reading, the M5 Air outperforms the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 16 by almost 20%. When typing, the M4 Pro only falls behind by 2.3% – a gap so small that it wouldn’t show up in any real-world task you gave it.
Apple hasn’t said much about the silent upgrade
When you jump over the M4 MacBook Air, it becomes a little hard to believe. Over 122% faster when reading, almost 117% faster when writing. This isn’t a footnote in the spec sheet – two drives that far apart don’t seem like the same product category.
Day after day, things add up faster than you would expect. That big RAW wedding shoot that used to take a lot of time to import? Done before you’ve poured your coffee. ProRes footage from the internal drive no longer feels like a gamble.
And when you run local AI models, the difference between waiting and not waiting is exactly that memory speed. For a laptop that starts at $1,099, none of this should be part of the discussion. Apple barely mentioned it at launch, which in retrospect was an odd call.
