Apple's M5 MacBook Air and 14-inch MacBook Pro share the same M5 chip but differ significantly in design, cooling, and display technology. Both use a 10-core CPU with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, along with integrated graphics that can scale up to 10 cores.

For everyday tasks like web browsing and document editing, the two machines perform similarly in short bursts. However, the MacBook Pro's active cooling system allows it to sustain higher performance during longer workloads such as video exporting, code compiling, or 3D rendering. The MacBook Air relies on passive cooling in its fanless chassis.

The MacBook Pro features a brighter Liquid Retina XDR display with mini-LED backlighting, reaching up to 1,000 nits for standard content and 1,600 nits for HDR. It also includes ProMotion with adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz. The MacBook Air uses a standard 60Hz Liquid Retina panel with 500-nit brightness.