There is a certain audacity to launching a laptop with twice the storage during a global storage shortage. Apple, never a company short on audacity, did exactly that on Tuesday when it unveiled the MacBook Air M5, a machine that somehow doubles the base configuration from 256GB to 512GB at a moment when the rest of the PC industry is quietly downgrading SSD specs to keep prices from spiralling out of control.
The headline numbers are real. The entry-level 13-inch MacBook Air M5 starts at US$1,099, now including 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage as standard. The 15-inch version starts at US$1,299. Both represent a US$100 increase over the M4 MacBook Air, though third-party retailers are likely to discount as supply settles. As Apple's own newsroom notes, the Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology and is configurable up to 4TB for the first time.
The storage jump is not purely generous. The new SSD also delivers 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation, significantly accelerating file access and speeding up workflows for users such as creators importing large photo libraries and students running AI workloads on device. That SSD speed gain, combined with the M5 chip's 10-core GPU architecture featuring a new Neural Accelerator in each core, which Apple claims provides over four times the peak GPU compute performance of the M4, gives the new Air a meaningful AI credentials story to tell.
Beyond chip and storage upgrades, the M5 chip brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity through a new custom "N1" wireless chip. Apple is retaining the same MacBook Air chassis it has used since the M2 chip in 2022, with flat edges and rounded corners, and no new colours: sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver remain the options.
Here's why it matters: the storage doubling is happening in one of the worst supply environments for NAND flash memory in recent memory. The ongoing global memory supply shortage, widely dubbed "RAMmageddon" in tech circles, is driven not by pandemic-era disruptions but by a structural reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward high-margin products for AI infrastructure, creating scarcity in consumer and enterprise PC markets. Reports indicate the NAND flash shortage is morphing into a full-fledged "dry year", prompting multiple PC manufacturers to plan SSD capacity downgrades in 2026 to keep device prices from spinning out of control.
The voracious demand for High Bandwidth Memory by hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon has forced Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to pivot limited cleanroom space and capital expenditure toward higher-margin enterprise-grade components. Every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the SSD of a consumer laptop. Apple, however, appears to have navigated the crunch more cleanly than rivals: Apple was reportedly less affected than its competitors, having secured long-term supply agreements for DRAM through the first quarter of 2026.
That supply positioning explains something the bare price tag does not. A US$100 increase for double the storage and a faster SSD is, in the abstract, a reasonable trade. When Apple raises base prices, this is generally how it does it: just last year it raised the base price of the iPhone 17 Pro by $100 but doubled the onboard storage. You get more, but you don't have an option to pay less and get less. It is a little disappointing, since Apple had finally gotten back to that magic sub-$1,000 price for the MacBook Air.
Critics of this pricing model make a fair point. The consumer who only needed 256GB of storage and valued that sub-$1,000 entry point is not offered a choice. Apple's decision to bundle more storage and charge for it, rather than offer both configurations, removes agency from the buyer. For a company that positions itself as a champion of user experience, that is a design choice worth scrutinising.
At the same time, the honest case for Apple's approach is difficult to dismiss. For consumers and enterprises alike, this signals the end of an era of cheap, abundant memory and storage, at least in the medium term. In that context, locking in 512GB at today's price, before further NAND cost increases bite, may actually represent reasonable value for buyers planning to hold a machine for five or more years. The question of who benefits most from that bargain, Apple's margins or the consumer's storage budget, is harder to answer cleanly.
Announced during Apple's March event, the MacBook Air M5 is more of an internal spec bump rather than a major revamp, consistent with previous generations. Its upgraded silicon does, however, bring the same chipset as the MacBook Pro M5. Single-core and multi-core results for the M5 were 14 and 22 percent faster than the M4 respectively, based on earlier MacBook Pro testing. For M1 and M2 users, the generational leap is significant. For anyone on an M3 or M4 model, the upgrade case is considerably thinner.
Pre-orders open Wednesday, March 4, with the MacBook Air M5 officially available from March 11. Australian pricing had not been confirmed at time of publication; Apple's local store is the authoritative source for AUD figures once they are released. Given the Reserve Bank of Australia's current interest rate environment and the Australian dollar's recent trading range against the US dollar, buyers should expect a material premium over the direct USD conversion.
The broader picture is one of genuine complexity. Apple has delivered a meaningful upgrade to the world's most popular laptop, as it describes the MacBook Air, at a moment when its supply chain discipline is paying dividends that competitors cannot match. The price increase is real, the removal of consumer choice is real, and the value proposition is stronger than it first appears. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a company with Apple's margin profile should be passing a memory crisis onto buyers at all. What is harder to argue is that the M5 Air, on its specifications alone, is a weak product. The cultural moment we're in, where AI performance has become the new megahertz wars, suits Apple's chip architecture rather well. Whether the ACCC or consumer advocates should scrutinise the industry's collective move toward bundled storage upgrades without lower-tier options is a separate, and worthwhile, question.