The big-screen Air: the same fanless M5 as the 13-inch but always with the 10-core GPU, a 15.3-inch display and six speakers, for people who want room to work more than a lighter bag. The extra GPU cores make it noticeably quicker in games and Blender than the base 13-inch, and its 153GB/s of memory bandwidth generates text from a 7-8B local model at over 30 tokens a second; 24GB or 32GB is the better buy for local AI.
Against the line-up
Geekbench 6 CPU
Geekbench 6 CPU
Geekbench 6 GPU
Blender Benchmark
The whole MacBook Air line-up side by side, with prices
Every benchmark
Quoted from the publications that ran them; we don't test hardware ourselves. Figures from different publications were run on different systems and scenes, so compare within a row's source.
Cyberpunk 2077
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p Ultra |
23.3fps | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB 1920 x 1080, Ultra preset, FSR off |
Local LLM (llama.cpp / Ollama)
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Llama 2 7B Q4_0, Generation |
31.9tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5, 10-core GPU, 153GB/s (run on a MacBook Air, 16GB) llama-bench tg128 (generating 128 tokens), all layers on the GPU. |
| Llama 2 7B Q4_0, Prompt processing |
723tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5, 10-core GPU, 153GB/s (run on a MacBook Air, 16GB) llama-bench pp512 (reading a 512-token prompt), all layers on the GPU. |
| Llama 2 7B Q8_0, Generation |
18.4tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5, 10-core GPU, 153GB/s (run on a MacBook Air, 16GB) llama-bench tg128 (generating 128 tokens), all layers on the GPU. |
Blender Benchmark
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Standard run |
1,979samples/min | Blender Open Data, Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5 (GPU - 10 cores), Metal, Blender 5.2.0 Median score over the three scenes, 31 submitted runs. Blender Open Data lists by chip, not by Mac. |
Geekbench 6 CPU
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-core |
16,995points | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB Geekbench 6.7 |
| Single-core |
4,195points | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB Geekbench 6.7 |
Geekbench 6 GPU
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Metal |
76,530points | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB Geekbench 6.7 GPU, Metal |
3DMark Steel Nomad
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Standard run |
1,070points | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB |
Cinebench 2024
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-core |
962points | Notebookcheck, Mar 8, 2026 MacBook Air 15 M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB |
Sources
- Blender Open Data (results database)
- Notebookcheck (review)
- llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub) (results database)
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