The MacBook Air has always been the sensible choice — great battery, light enough to forget it’s in your bag. What it’s never been is the one that makes MacBook Pro owners feel slightly embarrassed. Until now, apparently.
When Apple switched the M5 MacBook Air to PCIe 4.0 NAND flash, it didn’t just make it faster than its predecessor — it made it faster than some M4 Pro MacBook Pro models too.
Benchmark numbers that raise eyebrows
NotebookCheck’s hands-on review of the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air, using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, puts the numbers on the table:
| Model | Read (5GB) | Write (5GB) | vs. M5 Air (Read) | vs. M5 Air (Write) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
On reads, the M5 Air clears the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 16 by nearly 20%. On writes, the M4 Pro edges back by just 2.3% — a gap so small it wouldn’t show up in any real-world task you threw at it.
The quiet upgrade Apple didn’t talk about much
The jump over the M4 MacBook Air is where things get a little hard to believe. Over 122% faster on reads, nearly 117% faster on writes. That’s not a spec sheet footnote — two drives this far apart don’t feel like the same product category.
Day-to-day, it adds up faster than you’d expect. That big RAW wedding shoot that used to grind away on import? Done before you’ve poured your coffee. ProRes footage off the internal drive no longer feels like a gamble.
And if you’re running local AI models, the difference between waiting and not waiting is exactly this kind of storage speed. For a laptop that starts at $1,099, none of this was supposed to be part of the conversation. Apple barely mentioned it at launch, which — in hindsight — was a strange call.
