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Is the M5 MacBook Air's AI power a game-changer for students?
The MacBook Air is still the laptop most students opt for. We test whether the new M5 earns that reputation
- PUBLISHED: Tue 2 Jun 2026, 8:32 PM
Walk into almost any university in Dubai and you'll notice a pattern. Lecture halls, library tables, or café corners, the MacBook Air is rarely hard to spot. My brother, who studies law in Dubai, confirmed what I already suspected when I asked him about it recently. Most of his classmates use one. When I pushed him on why, the answers weren't particularly technical; iPhone, brand familiarity, and the fact that it slips into a bag without a second thought.
That last one, I understand completely. I've been using the 13-inch MacBook Air for a while now, and the portability is genuinely underrated in a way that spec sheets can't capture. It simply disappears. You stop thinking about carrying it, which is exactly what a student juggling textbooks, a matcha latte, and three deadlines needs from a laptop.
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But here's a question worth asking: is the MacBook Air the campus default because it's the best option, or because Apple has simply made itself unavoidable for iPhone users? With the M5 generation now on shelves, it's worth separating earned reputation from brand momentum.
What the M5 actually changes
The headline upgrade in the new MacBook Air is the M5 chip, and the most meaningful improvement for students isn't the one Apple leads with. Yes, the CPU is faster — around 18 per cent improvement in multithreaded performance over M4 — but that's incremental, not transformative. The bigger shift is in AI processing. The M5 delivers up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks compared to its predecessor, enabled by Neural Accelerators built into each GPU core.
For students, this is increasingly practical rather than theoretical. Running local AI models for research, coding assistance, or writing tools is becoming part of how university work actually gets done, and most Windows laptops at this price point struggle to handle it without throttling performance or draining the battery within an hour. The M5 handles it quietly, efficiently, and without a fan.
Storage has also doubled from the previous base configuration to 512GB, with read and write speeds that are twice as fast.
As for the battery, Apple says the latest MacBook Air can deliver up to 18 hours of battery life, which realistically means students can get through an entire day of lectures, study sessions, assignments, and even entertainment without constantly searching for a power socket.
In real-world testing, it would last around 16-18 hours during moderate workflows. Ideally, it lasts through a full university day — Zoom lectures, multiple browser tabs, a creative app open in the background.
Where it still asks you to compromise
Credibility requires saying this clearly that the MacBook Air M5 is not a perfect machine, and students spending serious money deserve to know what they're accepting.
The display runs at a standard 60Hz refresh rate. There's no ProMotion, no OLED, and no nano-texture option — those remain MacBook Pro territory, and Apple has indicated OLED won't arrive on the Air until at least 2027. For most academic work this is a non-issue, but creative students coming from high-refresh Android phones or gaming monitors will notice the difference.
And there are only two Thunderbolt ports. For students who need to connect to a monitor, charge simultaneously, and transfer files, a hub becomes a real additional expense.
Why it still makes sense
None of those caveats change the fundamental reality: for the vast majority of students, the MacBook Air M5 is genuinely the most capable everyday laptop in its class. The silent fanless design means it handles demanding tasks — coding environments, video editing, running local AI tools — without the thermal throttling that eventually catches up with similarly priced Windows machines. The build quality means it will likely outlast the degree. Additionally, macOS Tahoe adds Live Translation across 14 languages on-device, which is a useful addition for students in the UAE.
The ecosystem argument, which my brother's classmates expressed more instinctively than analytically, also holds up under scrutiny. If you already carry an iPhone, the continuity between devices — iPhone Mirroring, AirDrop, Handoff — removes friction from a student workflow in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel on a deadline.
The honest answer
Is the MacBook Air M5 the campus default because it deserves to be? Mostly, yes, though Apple's grip on the iPhone generation certainly helps. What the M5 adds to an already dependable foundation is meaningful where it counts: significant AI performance where student workflows are going, great storage, and wireless connectivity through Wi-Fi 7 that future-proofs the machine for the length of a degree.
It still doesn't have the display that students spending this much money might reasonably expect. But it remains, frustratingly for its competitors, the laptop that asks the fewest questions of the person carrying it, which, at 8am before a lecture, is not nothing.
Want to know more about your favourite tech products in the UAE? Check out the links below or click here to see Khaleej Times' coverage on technology.
