Apple MacBook Air 15 M5 Review - Very powerful, fanless and without competition

[Redaktion]

The MacBook Air 15 is now available with the powerful M5 SoC and the combination of performance as well as efficiency is simply perfect for a fanless design. It is also pretty much unrivaled, because there are simply no alternatives without fans in this segment.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M5-Review-Very-powerful-fanless-and-without-competition.1244905.0.html

[RobertJasiek]

The Specifications miss the Memory.

[Good,but inefficient iGPU]

I'm not an APPLE user (yet?), but no fan is nice. Tho it looks like the performance throttles to 1/3 (-66%) when stress-tested (see the graph above the "Speakers" section).

3.33 lbs/1.512 kg for 15.30 inch is just ok and nothing special.

The pixel response times are shower than vs predecessor Air 15 M4, but are still (just) ok and nice color coverage and brightness.

29% faster in Cyberpunk 2077 vs predecessor is good, but this is still only 23.3 FPS and overall the iGPU is 1/3 to 1/2 as fast as it should be at the minimum. Wonder if this was tested on a cool system, as when stress-tested, the performance drops to 1/3.

Wish the iGPU was faster/better utilized/more efficient:
Steel Nomad (Vulkan):

• Radeon 890M: Average score: 753
  
  • Bandwidth: 89.6 GB/s (= 128-bit * 5600 MT/s / 1000 / 8)
  • -> FPS score per GB/s = 753/89.6 = 8.40
• Apple MacBook Air 15 M5: 1070
  
  • Bandwidth: 153.6 GB/s (= 128-bit * 9600 MT/s / 1000 / 8)
  • -> FPS score per GB/s = 6.97
• 4050 Laptop: Average score: 1789
  
  • Bandwidth: 192.0 GB/s (= 96-bit * 16 Gbit/s / 8)
  • -> FPS score per GB/s = 9.32

[Please don't do this]

This doesn't take into account the size of L2 cache and system level caches, which is one of the reasons one architecture maybe able to get away with less DDR bandwidth over another but still get as high or higher FPS score.

[Please don't do this]

There's just too many other variables which impact gfx performance to make generalisations like this.

But in general, efficiency goes up with more cores. This is apples smallest GPU. What do you think is going to happen once the bigger Pro and Max variants that have been recently released are tested?

Is there a reason you insist on doing calculations based on synthetic benchmarks when we have in-game tests and scores?

It's throttling under combined synthetic CPU+GPU stress test with no fan. It doesn't throttle when gaming.

[dumb_oems]

> I'm not an APPLE user (yet?), but no fan is nice.

it is not nice, it is a game changer. probably I have Asperger's, but it reduces my stress levels like nothing else. It just brings zen.

> The CPU performance is not reduced on battery power.

This is not emphasized enough. The performance is out of this world at the given TDP. But that's not all, Windows laptops are usually benchmarked with high performance power profiles. But virtually no one uses them with such profiles, especially not on battery power - since the runtimes would go to complete s*** and it would be louder than a plane.

So not only do you have the best performance on paper for most tasks at amazing efficiency and power draw, but the practical experience of using the laptop will be much better to what the numbers suggest - since again, Intel/AMD (Qualcomm to a lesser extent but still significantly) throttle like crazy on battery power.

This is not emphasized enough honestly. There is no competition and the gap in the actual user experience, especially on battery power, is MUCH bigger than what the benchmarks suggest.

[dumb_oems]

Indirectly, this also means that battery life benchmarks are not fair.

You will tear your hairs out while using heavily throttled Intel CPUs on Windows laptops, apps will be slow to open, tabs will be slow to switch etc. Unless you switch to high perf power profiles, which will reduce battery life by 80%.

But of course, on Macbooks, there is no such benchmark hacking. The experience is snappy throughout. And even with that, they can still deliver 17 hours of battery life. Nothing with a comparable user experience comes close in the non-apple laptop market.

[JimD]

Fanless is not really an attraction for me. What I want is a quiet design. I'm not bothered by a fan that I can't hear. Windows OEMs are incredibly incompetent and can't even achieve giving that as an option.