A few months ago I wrote a blog post about the replacement cycle that I have been through since my very first laptop arrived in 1994. It’s complicated because for the last fifteen or so years I have always had at least two laptops on the go at any given time. That has tended to mean a “full-sized” MacBook Pro for the serious editing sessions and a MacBook Air for lugging around with me on jobs. Supplement that with a desk based computer and I’ve always been pretty well equipped.

About six hours after I posted which M4 chipped MacBook I was going to get Apple announced the M5 series of processors and I decided to wait a little while before committing my hard earned cash. I’ve watched the reports about the various configurations of M5 MacBook Pro models but in the end I decided that my need for a lightweight Mac was greater and ordered an M5 powered MacBook Air for delivery on the first day they became available. That was a couple of days ago and so far (and it really is early days) I am delighted with it. I opted for a 13″ M5 10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine model with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive and, as you can see from the photograph above, I opted for the silver finish over the other options as it looks less conspicuous.

After setting it up from a Time Machine backup on a fast SSD external drive and going through and swapping licenses around to enable everything to work my new Mac was ready to roll. “So how is it going?” I hear at least one of you asking…

Well it’s very early days but so far the signs are good. It handles Canon CR3 files from EOS R5 MkIIs really well in Adobe Camera RAW and everything is flying along nicely in Photo Mechanic. Rather oddly my first job where it was tested was actually helping one of my clients out with digitising some of their many thousands of transparencies. I was working with one of my cameras, a macro lens and a Valoi easy 35 slide copying set up. The laptop didn’t slow me down at any point during the day even though the camera was tethered to it with a USB C to USB C cable using Canon’s EOS Utility 3 application. In the past that set up has eaten computer batteries but in six hours of constant use the battery level only dropped by 40%. To put that into perspective that would have been 80% or more on my 2021 M1 MacBook Air and completely wiped out my elderly 15″ MacBook Pro (which has a nearly new battery). There was mains power available but I wanted to get some sense of what the battery life was really going to be like.

Today has been another easy win for the laptop as it has been used for a set of editorial portraits and has, once more, flown through an edit which produced 22 high resolution JPGs from over 250 Canon R5 MkII CR3s. To put some flesh on the bones of that I saved the same set of images from the M5 MacBook Air in 28 seconds, the M1 MacBook Air in 50 seconds and my trusty M1 Mac Studio in 22 seconds. Not bad for a laptop with less of almost everything (except storage) and a price tag of £1499.00 including VAT. Add to that 0% interest free credit from the Apple Store and I reckon I’ve made a good purchase.

At some point in the future (definitely the next financial year) I will probably replace my MacBook Pro as well but that is far less of a priority than it might otherwise have been.

Once I’ve put it through some rather more testing times I will try to come back and post an updated and rather more considered opinion but for now I’m humming the old 1972 Hawkwind song “Silver Machine”.

As something of a footnote, there are currently 4 Apple laptops here in my office. On top of the M5 MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air, the 2017 MacBook Pro there’s also my much used and much admired 11″ MacBook Air dating from late 2010. In its time the 11″ was a brilliant piece of kit which traveled everywhere with me. These days those super light jobs are done by an iPad Mini, but that’s a whole other series of blog posts.