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