Apple on Tuesday unveiled an updated iPad Air with fresh-ish new M-series silicon alongside a new Magic Keyboard with function keys.
Those hoping to get Apple’s home-grown M4 chips in a more budget oriented fondleslab will be disappointed to find Apple’s refreshed iPad is stuck on the iGiant’s older M3 chips announced all the way back in October 2023.
Specifically, the new iPad Air will ship with a slightly cut-down version of the M3, with eight 64-bit Arm-compatible CPU cores and nine GPU cores enabled rather than the usual ten. Having said that, the folks at Cupertino insist users can expect up to twice the computational performance and 4x the rendering performance of the older M1 iPad Air.
The latter figure is thanks in part to the improved graphics architecture introduced with the M3, which added support for dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing.
If you want the best performance possible in an iPad, opting for the Pro remains the only way to get Apple’s M4 silicon in tablet form. Announced this time last year, the M4 iPad Pro boasted up to ten CPU and ten GPU cores alongside a neural engine capable of 38 trillion INT8 operations per second (TOPS).
Like the last-gen, the new iPad Air will be available in both 11-inch and 13-inch sizes starting at $599 and $799 respectively when they hit store shelves on March 12. They come with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage.
Launching alongside the updated Airs is a new Magic Keyboard case which in addition to a larger trackpad now features dedicated function keys things like display brightness, media playback, and volume control.
These Magic keys don’t, however, come cheap, costing roughly 40 percent of a base model 11- or 13-inch iPad Air at $269 and $319, respectively.
Finally, Apple’s based model iPad is also getting new silicon and twice the storage of its predecessor at 128GB.
The 11th-gen iPad now comes standard with the A16 Bionic chip which first shipped in the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022. Despite using an even older chip than the one in the iPad Air, Apple claims the A16 is still 6x faster than the “best selling Android tablet,” which looking at the footnote refers rather vaguely to Qualcomm SM6375-based slates, which seems to be a jab at Samsung’s Tab A9+.
But while it might be more powerful than its A14-based predecessor, the A16 is still an odd choice for Apple considering it means its cheapest iPad can’t take advantage of all the machine-learning functionality, from AI proofreading, rewriting, and summarization to text-to-image and text-to-emoji generation, baked into and now enabled by default in iPadOS.
This comes in stark contrast to Apple’s new value oriented iPhone 16e which specifically does feature a compatible SoC in the form of the A18. Having said that, the iGiant’s decision to stick with the A16 may have came down to an excess of old chips or a desire to keep pricing low. The base model iPad starts at $349 and or $499 with cellular. ®
