Pro has longer battery life.
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Yeah I think the only advantage of the Air is its weight and thin frame? Everything else is just better with the Pro, especially the display. I didn’t really grasp the difference and thought only about 60Hz vs. 120Hz, but the Pro is twice as bright and has a much better picture quality in general (deep blacks and great colours).
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I would go for the M5, with as much RAM as you can afford. I don’t see any good reason not to go for 32GB, especially since memory is for the whole SoC.
Air is maybe a bit lighter but has a tendency to thermal-throttle if you push it too, and given poorer and poorer optimisation of software these days that will surely happen.
Regarding storage I like not to worry about filling the drive, I went for 2TB, that might seem overkill but I see that as comfortable. Anything less than 1TB will have you juggling with external drives rather than using them for, you know, backups.
I predict this won’t age well.
Even Apple has 16GB as standard on even their entry-level configurations these days.
Agree.
For travel and couch use, the Air feels much nicer.
I mean… there isn’t really an indication in Cortana’s original post that he will, is there?
And the UI will run fine for years to come.
I used a Pro for many many years, recently switched to an Air. The pros/cons you listed here summarize the difference noticeable in day to day usage pretty much to the point
only having two USBC ports on the left side of the Air bugs me a bit. Would be nice to have some on the right side as well. As for the weight/size - I’ve been traveling a lot with the Air and am happy that I made the switch due to that - the portability is just much better than with the Pro.
Picture Quality wasn’t thaaat noticeable to me but the Pro has much better and louder sound. If you tend to listen to music or enjoy crisp audio in general I’d get the Pro.
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Despite mentioning only lightweight, office-type “use cases”…
I’d bet a Franc that @Cortana will be rationalising 
himself into buying a Pro.
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Bet a better coin. Bet a btc.
I’m interested in that “even”. When I think of Apple as a brand, I think quality so I would think they’d be more likely to go for the higher specs as their customers are potentially less price sensitive and more likely to associate the performances with the product itself rather than some of its components (that can easily be upgraded). Am I wrong in that?
I predict we won’t be able to tell because it seems that I really don’t have the same idea of what consitutes reasonable performance and reasonable specs for a non-gaming laptop than most here.
The price difference isn’t that big, though so I wouldn’t fret it that much. I just wanted to throw out there that we may not always need top specs for most uses. Time spent managing the hardware at my former (administrative) job had me be amazed at just how far 600.- to 800.- can take you.
I tend to „overspend“ when it comes to tech but I also keep my stuff for a long time. I‘m glad for example that I went with a 512GB iPhone 14 Pro Max 3.5 years ago. Replaced the battery after 3 years of usage it feels new again. Will probably keep it a couple of years if nothing major happens. Same with my PC. RTX3080 would have been enough back in 2020/2021 but today I‘m really glad that I have a GPU with 24GB of VRAM (instead of 10GB). Otherwise I would have been forced to upgrade. Now I‘m just going to keep my 3090 longer than I ever did with previous graphics cards. Probably even skip the entire mid-cycle GPU upgrade and build a completely new system in 2029/2030.
So I might buy a Macbook Pro (2026) with the M5 Pro chip and 32GB of RAM if it‘s not too expensive.
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…at a cost. As an “Upsell”.
Their entry-level configurations have always been “underspecced” (on RAM and storage) since… forever? 16GB is decent for a change.
They had a paltry 8GB minimum on their MacBook Airs from 2017 throughout 2024 (before the early 2025 release of M4 MacBook Airs).
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Not very Mustachian though, is it? 
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What a missed opportunity 
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Writing, email, browsing, light office work, vacations, some couch (and, for me, educational) use:
Personally, I bought an M4 MacBook Air at CHF 770 last year for that use case.
Little point in paying CHF 200 - 26% of its overall price - on another 8GB of RAM. Would’ve had to pay more, in fact, cause only the 16GB variants were discounted as much.
PS: I’d only “overspec” on my most used device, not a secondary devices (like my MacBook Air).
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I would consider myself a power user.
I had the MacBook Air M1 for five years and now the MacBook Air M4 13”.
Both of them with 512GB and 16GB RAM.
There has not been a single moment where I felt that there is a performance problem.
My understanding is that 512GB is slightly faster as the 256GB version as the NAND chips can be used in parallel. Not sure if this is still the case.
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I have exactly the same configuration, except that the screen is 15″ rather than 13″.
I bought it about one year ago as a replacement for a 2019 12″ MacBook Pro (Intel, 16 GB RAM).
I use the MBA both for my daily work (around 90% of the time) and for personal use (the remaining 10%). Work-related activities are mainly Office, Teams and similar tools, while personal use includes some photo editing (RAW files — previously with Adobe Lightroom, now transitioning to DxO PhotoLab).
I am very happy with the MBA. I am not entirely sure how much of this is due to the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon and how much to other factors, but the improvement is significant. For example, I have noticed HUGE gains in tasks such as audio transcription using Whisper.
I have not experienced any thermal throttling so far. By contrast, my previous MacBook Pro had frequent fan activity, even after a battery replacement (which I understand may have contributed to the issue), and that was driving me crazy ! 
The fanless design of the MacBook Air has been a game changer for me.
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Most of it is due to Apple silicon chips. It was a revolutionary step in terms of performance, heat and energy consumption. Excelleting video covering that development:
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Having a fan cools the cpu down and actually avoid thermal throttling, which might happen more frequently with passive cooling (air).
The gap is so huge between your two computers that cpu may be throttled and still powerful (and silent).
Most people don’t need much CPU power and so a thin light machine is good enough, or you push computation to cloud machines.
With cloud storage, you might get away with a small amount of local space and save stuff in the cloud instead.
I think the main thing is to have something that can run browser and local only stuff smoothly.
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I went to the store now to check out the MBP 14“ and MBA 13“ in person. Played around with both for 15 minutes and things that stood out to me:
- Build quality, look and feel really great with both.
- Holy cow at the weight difference. It‘s only 300-400g and I‘m a very strong guy, but the Air feels like it‘s half the weight of the Pro.
- Anticipated, but the display of the Pro is just on a completely different level. I‘m used to 160Hz at home and 120Hz feel very close to that whereas 60Hz is really kind of blurry/slow.
I just wish there would be a 120Hz Air with more than 500nits. That would be perfect.
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