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MacBooks have always offered a balanced package, but they've always had trouble keeping up with similarly priced Windows laptops in terms of specifications alone. This makes sense, as Apple's productivity notebooks — especially the MacBook Airs — were never supposed to do intense tasks like running AAA games. However, with the advent of Apple's M-series chips, this gap has been steadily getting smaller. Now, an Apple computer with the latest M5 chips is actually a good deal for its price, as it can compete with the hardware that's in competitors in the same price range.
If you want a general productivity laptop that can also do some light gaming, you won't find a better deal than a MacBook Air, especially one using the M5 chip. However, there are still cheaper, budget-friendly Windows laptops under a thousand dollars that are more powerful than the MacBook Air. These won't be better than the Air under all circumstances, but if there's a specific area you're aiming for — be it gaming performance or visuals — there are always cheaper alternatives to the MacBook Air.
As far as performance goes, the M5 MacBook Air performs between M3 Pro- and M4 Pro-based machines on average for light tasks. This performance is worse when we talk about intense rendering or gaming, which means the M5 MacBook Air is roughly only as good as an M3 Pro for gaming. This is because of the M5 Air being fanless, which means it'll eventually throttle its performance to keep functioning so it doesn't heat up.
1. MSI Katana 15 HX
The MacBook Air isn't a gaming laptop, despite the M5 chips being fairly powerful. This is because, regardless of the processor inside, a gaming laptop that has a dedicated GPU has high odds of performing better than the MacBook Air in long, intense gaming or video editing sessions.
Fortunately, there are a ton of good gaming laptops under $1000 that have GPUs inside them and are more powerful than the M5 MacBook Air. One of the best budget gaming laptops in this price range is MSI's Katana HX at $899 on Walmart, which comes with an RTX 5050 GPU and an Intel i7 processor. The laptop has a 144Hz 1080p IPS screen. Its 512GB of storage is usually one of its downsides, but it's also the same as the MacBook Air's base configuration.
As far as its performance goes, it outperforms the M5 MacBook Air in terms of gaming. We've talked about how the MacBook Air can't keep up with gaming laptops in terms of sustained load because it heats up, but the MSI Katana can output more than thrice as many frames per second on average (20 FPS compared to the Katana's 75 FPS on Ultra settings), even with a relatively cool MacBook Air when running graphics-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077. This reinforces the results from synthetic benchmarks, where the MSI Katana scored 17,051 on Wild Life Extreme compared to the M5 Air's 11,628. This is also the M5 MacBook Air with 10 GPU cores compared to the base M5's 8, which makes the difference even more significant.
2. Asus TUF Gaming A16
While the MSI Katana 15 HX is an amazing choice for its price, many consider the Asus TUF Gaming A16 to be the best gaming laptop under $1000 with no real asterisks involved. You can get the A16 for $949 on Amazon, and this particular configuration will come with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, similar to both the MacBook Air and the MSI Katana. It uses a Ryzen 7 processor and has a dedicated AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU, which is how it performs consistently even during heavy gaming. It does have the same 1920x1200-pixel IPS panel as the MSI, but it supports up to 165 hertz for gaming.
The TUF A16, like the MSI Katana, pretty much dwarfs the M5 MacBook Air in gaming performance. While Apple's computer with the M5 chip can run lower-end games just fine, the moment you try running a AAA title like Cyberpunk, the difference is obvious. Running Cyberpunk on the A16 on Ultra settings should get you 70 FPS on Ultra settings on average, whereas the M5 MacBook Air struggled to reach 40 FPS in the High graphics preset, a step below Ultra. Again, the M5 can only go up to 20 FPS in Ultra, making the Asus laptop three times as fluid in this specific game. This difference is also evident in synthetic gaming benchmark scores like 3DMark, where the Asus laptop scored an average of 6109 compared to the M5 Air scoring around 3700 on the Solar Bay Extreme test.
3. LOQ 15-inch AMD
The LOQ laptops are part of Lenovo's mid-range series that is a step below the Legion laptops in both performance and price. This particular configuration can be bought from Lenovo for $999 and features an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and an RTX 5050 GPU, the same one in the MSI Katana 15. This configuration comes with the same 16GB of RAM as the MacBook Air, but unlike other budget gaming laptops on this list, actually has a 1TB SSD. The 1920x1080 IPS display isn't its strong suit, but the 144-hertz refresh rate makes it good for gaming either way. It's also relatively light for a gaming laptop at 5.07 lbs, though it's significantly heavier than the MacBook Air weighing just 2.70 lbs.
The LOQ doesn't perform as great as some of the other options on our list, but the laptop is still more powerful than the MacBook Air despite being cheaper. In tests running Cyberpunk on Ultra settings, it hovered between 60 and 70 FPS, whereas the MacBook Air barely touched 40 FPS on High and rendered an unplayable 20 FPS on Ultra.
Additionally, some variants of the LOQ have gone down as low as $599 in deals on Best Buy. If you manage to catch one on such a deal, it'll be about half the price of a MacBook Air and still perform better in heavy games.
4. Acer Nitro V 16 AI
The other laptops on this list all have their own way of being more powerful than a MacBook Air, but what if you want something more versatile? Both the MSI Katana and the ASUS TUF A16 are better for gaming specifically, but if you want a newer-generation laptop that can also perform AI tasks better, Acer's Nitro V AI is a solid budget laptop.
The Acer Nitro V AI, as the name suggests, is a laptop that has a dedicated NPU for AI tasks. It also comes with an AMD Ryzen processor and a dedicated RTX GPU and you can choose your own configuration. The Ryzen 5 and RTX 5050 version regularly sells below $1000. It has the same 1920x1200-pixel resolution as many other budget gaming laptops, but this specific laptop comes with a whopping 180 hertz refresh rate.
For its performance, it won't be doing AI or CPU-intensive tasks faster than the MacBook Air M5, but it should perform better during gaming while not being as far behind in other stuff as the other laptops on this list. In Cyberpunk, the game can average 60+ FPS on Ultra and approached 70 FPS on High, a little less than double what the MacBook Air can do. As far as benchmarks go, 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme often put the Acer Nitro V just a few hundred points below the 17,000 score that the MSI Katana achieved. You can get the laptop for $779 on Walmart at the time of writing, but there have been deals that put it as low as $629.
How we decided on what budget laptops are more powerful than the M5 MacBook Air
The MacBook Air with the M5 chip is an absolute powerhouse in terms of performance. It wouldn't be a stretch to put it among the best laptops in its price range in terms of all-around use. There's almost no laptop that you can get under $1000 that can outperform the MacBook Air in terms of CPU processing power that also has this good a battery life, display, and can perform localized AI tasks so well.
Any laptop with a GPU at least as good as an RTX 4050 could outperform the MacBook Air when running heavy games, though such laptops don't have a longer battery life than MacBooks. There are also laptops that offer much higher refresh rates for gaming but don't have the same resolution and color gamut as the MacBook Air. Hence, we went with options that target individual areas rather than being a better all-round package.
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