Apple today announced refreshed MacBook Air models featuring the M5 chip and doubled base storage. The new lineup starts at $1,099 with 512GB SSD, up from 256GB previously, and maintains configurability up to 4TB. Pre-orders begin March 4 with launch on March 11.

Apple's M5 chip delivers significant performance gains with a 10-core CPU Apple claims as the world's fastest. The processor supports up to 10 GPU cores with Neural Accelerators, offering 4x faster AI performance compared to the M4. Memory bandwidth increases to 153GB/s, a 28% improvement, while SSD read/write speeds double.

The updated MacBook Air also includes Apple's custom N1 wireless chip enabling Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. Enhanced shader cores and a third-generation ray-tracing engine round out the hardware improvements. The $100 price increase reflects these substantial upgrades across storage, connectivity, and processing power.