Apple might not be attending MWC, but that hasn’t stopped the company from announcing a new tablet this week.
Apple has officially brought its M3 chip to the iPad Air, but what else is new? Keep reading to discover all the important differences between the iPad Air M3 and last year’s highly-rated iPad Air M2.
Price
The iPad Air M3 was announced on March 4, with the tablet officially on sale from March 12. However, eager shoppers can pre-order their new iPad right now.
The 11-inch Air M3 starts at $599/£599 (Wi-Fi) or $749/£749 (Wi-Fi + cellular), while the larger 13-inch Air M3 starts at $799/£799 (Wi-Fi) or $949/£949 (Wi-Fi + cellular).
The iPad Air M2 was made available on May 15 2024. The 11-inch model started at $599/£599 (Wi-Fi) or $749/£749 (Wi-Fi + cellular) at launch, while the 13-inch Air M2 started at $799/£799 (Wi-Fi) or $949/£949 (Wi-Fi + cellular).
The 13-inch version has since seen some discounts, with Amazon in particular lowering the price of the Wi-Fi-only model to $699/£749. We hope to see more discounts across the iPad Air M2 as the M3 model steals its spot as the top-of-the-line Air.
The iPad Air M3 has a 50% faster CPU
As you’ve probably gathered from the name, the iPad Air M3 is powered by Apple’s M3 chipset. This is a step above the M2 chip in the 2024 iPad Air M2.
According to Apple, the M3 chip in the iPad Air M3 is nearly twice as fast as the M1 chip in the iPad Air M1 and up to 35% faster when tackling multithreaded CPU workflows. Considering that Apple claimed the iPad Air M2 was nearly 50% faster than the iPad Air M1 at launch, we can expect another 50% improvement between the iPad Air M2 and the Air M3.
The iPad Air M3 is built on new graphics architecture
According to Apple, the M3 chipset delivers 40% faster graphics than the M1 in the iPad Air M1. It is also up to four times faster when faced with graphics-intensive rendering workflows, enabling more realistic reflections and shadows.
It isn’t clear exactly how this GPU performance translates between the M2 and the M3, but we’ll be sure to test the performance in our review of the tablet.
More notably, the iPad Air M3 brings Apple’s advanced graphics architecture to the iPad Air line for the first time. This includes features like dynamic caching to allocate the use of local memory in real-time, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing for more accurate lighting and reflections.
The iPad Air M3 delivers faster AI performance
Naturally, the benefits of the M3 extend to AI, with the Neural Engine in the iPad Air M3 up to 60% faster than that found in the iPad Air M1. The Neural Engine in the iPad Air M2 was 40% faster than that in the iPad Air M1, meaning we can expect a further 20% boost this time around.
That said, both the iPad Air M3 and the iPad Air M2 are powerful enough to support Apple Intelligence, meaning you won’t need to upgrade to take advantage of features like Writing Tools, Clean Up for photos, Image Playground and Genmoji image generation and more conversational Siri with a hand from ChatGPT.
Early verdict
The only real difference between the iPad Air M3 and the iPad Air M2 is the transition to the faster M3 chipset. Otherwise, the design, screen, camera and battery life are identical to those on the 2024 model, making this more of a minor update on the popular tablet line.
Keep an eye out for our review of the iPad Air M3 to learn how these two tablets compare in our real-world experience and benchmark tests.
