If you need an ultra portable laptop that can edit 4K, 6K, even 8K raw video with phenomenal battery life, the M5 MacBook Air is a surprisingly great choice. But you could also save your money and get 90% of the performance for a much cheaper price. I’m Matt Johnson, and in this post I’m reviewing the M5 MacBook Air from the perspective of a video editor.
For the sake of full transparency, this video is not paid or sponsored by Apple. I bought this laptop with my own money.
My Background: From PC to MacBook Air
Historically, I’ve been a PC guy. I still use a custom built desktop as my main computer for day to day editing, and that’s still true today. I’m on Windows 11 most days.
But there are plenty of times when I’m traveling and can’t bring my desktop with me. That’s when I need a laptop, and I used PC laptops for many years. Last year I changed things up and bought an M4 MacBook Air, because I wanted an ultra compact, lightweight laptop that was still powerful enough to edit video on the road.
That decision paid off. The M4 Air surprised me with how capable it was, especially considering it doesn’t even have a fan. Editing on this laptop over the past year has been quick and smooth, with phenomenal battery life. The only time I noticed it slow down was during rendering, mostly due to the lack of a fan for cooling. If you want the full breakdown of how that laptop held up, I covered it in my M4 MacBook Air long term review for video editing.
Why Upgrade to the M5?
So why upgrade? For me, it really comes down to storage. I’ve been extremely happy with the M4, but I only chose 500 gigs of storage when I bought it, and I constantly found myself juggling external SSDs while copying footage to and from the laptop. It was, in a word, inconvenient.
My fix was taking advantage of Apple’s trade in program. I purchased a brand new M5 MacBook Air with one terabyte of storage and got paid $755 for my M4. Not bad at all.
Build Quality and Design
From an overall build quality and construction standpoint, this laptop is stellar. It’s extremely well put together, the trackpad is fantastic, and the keyboard is a joy to type on. Apple has really dialed in all of the physical controls.
My only real complaint, and it’s one I can look past, is the port selection. Just like the M4 Air, the M5 has two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side. I can’t help but wish it had three, because as a video editor I’m constantly copying files from one hard drive to another, and more ports are always better.
SSD Upgrades: Bigger and Faster
One real upgrade the M5 MacBook Air has over the M4 is the SSD situation. The base price went up by $100, but with that extra hundred bucks, the minimum SSD size jumped from 256GB to 512GB. As someone who also owns a base MacBook Neo with only 256 gigs of storage, I can tell you that’s barely enough to get by. You will really appreciate having at least 512 gigs of space.
Another improvement is the addition of a PCIe5 SSD, which is much faster than the M4’s drive. If you copy a lot of files regularly, you’ll notice they transfer twice as fast, which is a genuinely great quality of life upgrade.
Display Quality for Color Work
The screen is a very color accurate panel, capable of hitting the full Rec709 and P3 color spaces by my testing, which makes it great for color grading. While the screen is a step down in quality from the higher end MacBook Pros, I’ve color graded dozens of videos on this screen over the past year and it can still easily get the job done without issue. If you want to take your color grades even further, check out my LUTs for a quick, professional starting point on any project.
Performance: CPU, GPU, and Memory Bandwidth
I really didn’t have any complaints about the speed and performance of the M4 MacBook Air for video editing, aside from slightly longer render times. From a software standpoint, importing footage into DaVinci Resolve, making cuts, and rearranging clips, the M4 was extremely good. But the M5 is a sizable jump in specs over the M4.
In Apple’s marketing materials, the CPU is about 10% faster, the GPU is 30% faster, and memory bandwidth is up to 153 gigabits per second, compared to 120 on the M4.
More importantly, and this isn’t something Apple advertises directly, the biggest factor affecting your editing and render speeds on an M series MacBook is the hardware encoder and decoder. In my testing, these encoders and decoders are noticeably faster on the M5.
That means less lag and smoother timeline performance while editing. When I tested DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut, I found the M5 MacBook Air easily handles 4K, 6K, and even 8K H.265 footage. Throw RED RAW and ProRes RAW at it, and it scrubs through footage just as smoothly as the M4 did, especially in Resolve and Final Cut.
Unfortunately, the base model MacBook Air is hard for me to recommend if you edit in Premiere Pro. I’d look at upgrading the memory to 24 gigs, which may help, or just look at a MacBook Pro instead, since that will run Premiere much more smoothly. I cover this exact tradeoff in more detail in my M5 MacBook buyer’s guide for video editing, which will help you land on the right model for your workflow and budget.
Export Speed Comparisons: M5 vs M4
This is where the numbers get genuinely impressive. Exporting the same 10 minute project on both laptops:
Final Cut Pro: The M5 was 17% faster than the M4, finishing in 3 minutes 33 seconds versus 4 minutes 10 seconds.
DaVinci Resolve: The M5 was 25% faster, taking just 4 minutes 15 seconds versus 5 minutes 18 seconds on the M4.
Premiere Pro: Slower than the other two programs overall, but still 40% faster on the M5 at 8 minutes 4 seconds, compared to 11 minutes 18 seconds on the M4. Premiere really likes a lot of GPU power and RAM.
Across the board, that’s anywhere from 17% to 40% faster on the M5 compared to the M4 when it comes to rendering.
AI Performance and Neural Accelerators
Apple focused heavily on AI in their marketing for the M5, since they’ve now included neural accelerators in every GPU core, which helps with AI workloads.
You might think that only applies to running a local LLM, and that’s true, but more importantly for video editors, a lot of editing software is incorporating AI powered tools and effects that run locally on your machine.
I tested this by loading the latest version of DaVinci Resolve 21 and trying its new AI powered face age transformer tool. The M5 scrubbed through clips with the effect applied significantly faster than the M4. There wasn’t quite enough of a speed increase to get fully smooth playback, but it’s a nice improvement and shows those AI neural accelerators are doing real work.
Final Verdict: Should You Buy the M5 MacBook Air?
Here’s my overall take. In my opinion, this is simultaneously the best ultra compact laptop Apple makes, but it’s also not a revolutionary upgrade over the M4.
If you’re coming from an M1 through M3 series laptop, you’ll be very happy with the M5 Air. But if you can find an M4 Air refurbished or on sale for cheap, that will give you a pretty similar experience for a much cheaper price.
If you’re still weighing your options across the whole M5 lineup, including the Pro models, take a look at my M5 MacBook Pro buyer’s guide for video editing for the full breakdown.
And if you want to level up your editing skills no matter which laptop you choose, grab my free guide, Edit Videos Like a Pro. It walks through the biggest rules I follow as a video editor to create better videos, and it’s completely free to download.