Why the M5 MacBook Air is the only laptop I’d buy during Prime Day

Having lived with the M1 MacBook Air for a good few years, I had been eagerly waiting for the M5 update ever since hearing about its performance leap. I was so eager to get my hands on the new M5 MacBook Air that I ordered it the day it launched in India. And I’m happy to report that it not only lived up to those expectations but, in many ways, exceeded them, especially considering the hardware I came from.

Since it was a day-one purchase, I had to pay full price for the laptop. If someone asked me whether I regret it, I would reply with a resounding “no”. Now that the M5 MacBook Air is discounted for Amazon Prime Day, I can’t keep to myself just how fantastic a deal it is at its sale price.

With the colorful new budget-oriented MacBook Neo making its debut with all its catchy design and incredible value proposition, the M5 MacBook Air got a bit sidelined. While the Neo got all the attention, the M5 Air turned out to be that reliable laptop for me that could run anything I could possibly throw at it without worrying about bottlenecking its hardware resources. And yes, Neo’s 8GB of RAM is indeed a bottleneck for any kind of serious work in 2026.

While the Neo is a fantastic product in itself, I am not its target customer. The Air gets me a better trackpad, a higher-quality display I’ve grown used to, and, more importantly, the M5 processor inside. Being Apple’s newest chip, it is able to run a bunch of large language models locally, without which I wouldn’t be able to test many of the AI tools that I use every single day. On top of that, RAM is becoming a scarce commodity these days, and the M5 MacBook Air happens to come with a generous 16GB of it from the base variant.

These hardware differences dictated that the M5 MacBook Air was a better overall deal for someone like me who doesn’t just write, but also occasionally uses more taxing apps, from video editing to web development and, of course, AI testing — sometimes all simultaneously.

Until a few days ago, it was only speculation that memory shortages could lead to further price hikes. We have already seen Apple increase the prices of the MacBook Air, which starts at $1,099 instead of $999 last year. The company did soften the blow by doubling the base storage to 512GB, but I wouldn’t expect similar generosity from it going forward.

Tim Cook recently warned that price hikes across Apple products are unavoidable. And you can attribute those imminent hikes almost entirely to rising memory chip prices. iPhones need a minimum of 12GB while MacBooks need a minimum of 16GB of RAM to run their large language models and AI tasks locally. There couldn’t be a clearer sign, coming from the CEO himself, that these products are indeed going to get even more expensive, and that this year’s $100 increase wasn’t the end.

This is one of the reasons I think I made the right call by upgrading to the M5 MacBook Air when the value proposition was just right — and right now, for Prime Day, it’s even better.

The M5 MacBook Air is officially priced at $1,099 for the base model that comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. While taking a look at its price history, I noticed that the laptop dropped as low as $899 last month, which is an even more incredible value. Right now, for Prime Day, you can grab it for just a bit more at $949, which still saves you a handsome $150 off its full price.

It is the perfect middle ground, sitting right between the entry-level MacBook Neo and the more professionally oriented MacBook Pros. It is still as light and portable as ever while offering significantly better performance this year, thanks to the M5 chip. If, like me, you’re coming from an M1 or M2 MacBook Air, there couldn’t be a better time to make the switch.