Apple MacBook Air 13.6" M5 2026, 16GB, 1TB SSD, Midnight

The MacBook Air M5 is the best laptop for 90% of people, period. It's light, fast, silent, and priced to make Windows ultraportables sweat.

The M5 10-core CPU lands in the 81st percentile overall, which sounds modest until you remember this is a fanless laptop that sips power. What surprised us is how the 10-core GPU handles AI workloads. Apple crammed a Neural Accelerator into each GPU core, so running Apple Intelligence or local LLMs feels snappy, not like a party trick. The 16GB of unified RAM is the one spec that gives us pause. It's fine for most people, but 51st percentile means power users doing heavy multitasking or video editing will feel the ceiling sooner than they'd like.

The Surface Laptop 7th Edition is the closest real competitor, and it's a good machine, but the M5 Air beats it on battery efficiency and raw CPU performance in our database. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 and Lenovo Legion Pro 7i are gaming laptops, so they'll crush the Air on graphics, but they're heavier, louder, and have fans that spin up like jet engines. The HP OMEN Transcend 14 is a weird middle ground that doesn't do anything better than the Air except game. If you want a thin laptop for work, school, or travel, the Air wins. If you want to play Cyberpunk, buy the G14.

At $1,319 USD for the 1TB model, this is the best value MacBook Air Apple has ever shipped. You're getting M5 performance, a 1TB SSD, and that gorgeous display for less than what a mid-tier Windows ultraportable costs. The CAD pricing of $2,240 to $2,300 is a bit steeper, but still reasonable for what you get. If you can find it at Costco before a price hike, grab it. One reviewer literally said the savings justified their membership.

The MacBook Air M5 is the laptop most people should buy, full stop. Apple took the already excellent M4 Air, dropped in a 3nm M5 chip, and kept everything that made this thing great. It's stupidly light at 1.24kg, dead silent with no fan, and the 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display still looks better than screens on laptops costing twice as much. The 98.5/100 compact score in our database isn't a typo. This is the best ultraportable on the market right now.

If you're looking for a gaming laptop, this isn't it. The 25.3/100 gaming score is one of the worst in our database for modern titles. Go get an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 or a Lenovo Legion Pro 7i instead. Also skip this if you need more than 16GB of RAM for heavy creative work. The MacBook Pro with 32GB or 64GB is the better tool for that job.

Buy it. Unless you need to game or run heavy creative workloads that demand more than 16GB of RAM, the MacBook Air M5 is the obvious choice. It's the best ultraportable on the market, and the price makes it a no-brainer. The 98th percentile reliability score means this thing will outlast your next three phones.