Apple just revealed an updated iPad Air with an M3 chip. It still starts at $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model, but there’s not much of a reason for most people to upgrade.
The current iPad lineup is a bit confusing, with the iPad Air serving as the middle ground between the base iPad and the iPad Pro. The iPad Air was updated last year with an M2 chip and a new 13-inch screen option, and now it’s been updated again alongside a new base iPad. I would have liked to see an OLED screen, a headphone jack or second USB-C port, and maybe even MagSafe charging support, but this is pretty much just a chip upgrade.
The Same Design
There aren’t any surprises here with the new iPad Air’s design. You still get 11-inch and 13-inch screen options, Touch ID on the power button, stereo speakers, and a USB-C port for charging and data transfer. It supports both the Apple Pencil Pro and the USB-C Apple Pencil, which are sold separately. The headphone jack is also still missing.
Sadly, the iPad Air is using the same IPS LED “Liquid Retina” display panel as earlier Air models, and not the upgraded OLED panel used in the latest iPad Pro. The IPS screen is perfectly fine, but it would have been nice to see an OLED screen in an iPad that didn’t have a $1,000 starting price.
The M3 Upgrade
The main upgrade here is the M3 chip, which is (roughly) the same one found in the 2024 M3 MacBook Air, 2023 24-inch iMac, and other Mac models. This is the first iPad to use the M3 chip, since the latest iPad Pro skipped straight from an M2 chip to the latest M4 hardware, and the base iPad models use lower-power A-series chipsets.
Apple says this iPad should be “nearly 2x faster” than the M1 iPad Air, and up to 3.5x faster than the older iPad Air with an A14 Bionic chip. The performance bump will be especially noticeable in gaming, video editing, and anything else that benefits from more CPU and GPU power. It also supports the same Apple Intelligence features as other M-series iPads, allowing you to summarize notifications, use a more powerful Siri, rewrite and summarize text, and other actions with an on-device AI model.
If you use an iPad for normal tablet tasks, like streaming media, browsing the web, and casual gaming, that upgrade in processing power won’t make much of a difference. iPadOS is still too locked down for apps to take full advantage of the hardware—web browsers with custom engines, software development IDEs, emulators, and virtual machines are still mostly banned from the App Store. Unless you’re playing cutting-edge mobile games or working in Final Cut, an iPad Air from a few generations ago will work about the same.
Related
Apple said in a press release, “Featuring a more powerful 8-core CPU, M3 is up to 35 percent faster for multithreaded CPU workflows than iPad Air with M1. M3 features a 9-core GPU with up to 40 percent faster graphics performance over M1. M3 also brings Apple’s advanced graphics architecture to iPad Air for the first time with support for dynamic caching, along with hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing.”
Pricing & Availability
The 11-inch iPad Air with M3 starts at $599 for the Wi-Fi model, and $749 for the Wi-Fi and Cellular model. The 13-inch model starts at $799 for W-Fi and $949 for Wi-Fi and Cellular. That’s the same pricing as the previous iPad Air, and they have the same 128GB base storage capacity.
You can buy the new iPad Air from Apple’s online store, with pre-orders starting today and full availability coming March 12. It should also appear soon at the usual third-party retailers, like Amazon and Best Buy. Education customers can get the 11-inch model for $549 and the 13-inch model for $749.
Source: Apple
