Apple updated the iPad Air with the M4 chip, bringing improved performance at such a great price. However, there are still several tidbits that you may have missed, and other omissions that the iPad Air still falls short.
Same design, same display down to the specs
The iPad Air continues to feature the same design as its predecessor, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since the same design allows the iPad Air to work with the same accessories as before. This includes the Apple Pencil Pro, Apple Pencil (USB-C), and the Magic Keyboard.
Since there are no subtle design changes, this means this iPad Air continues to lack the Adaptive True Tone flash that would be useful for things like scanning documents. Both the iPad mini and the iPad Pro have had the True Tone flash for years, so the fact that the iPad Air still omits this feature makes this tablet the odd “middle child.”
This also means we still get Touch ID instead of Face ID, and there won’t be a nano-texture display option for this iPad.
This iPad Air continues to use the exact same display as before for both the 11-inch and the 13-inch models. This not only means that the larger 13-inch model has a slightly bright screen, but this also means that the iPad Air continues to feature 60Hz refresh rates, which will certainly be subjected to criticism as 60Hz displays are starting to get rather in the tooth, especially with the regular iPhone 17 just adopted ProMotion technology that allow the display to refresh at up to 120Hz.
M4 chip
For comparison, the previous-generation iPad Air used a binned M3 chip (8-core CPU/9-core GPU). The previous-generation iPad Pro actually used two variants of the M4 chip, depending on the storage configurations:
- For the 256GB and 512GB models, the M4 chip is a binned variant with 9 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and 8GB RAM.
- For the 1TB and 2TB models, the M4 chip is full-fledged with 10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and 16GB RAM.
The M4 chip on the iPad Air that Apple just introduced is actually another binned variant with one less core for both the CPU and the GPU, for a total of 8 CPU cores and 9 GPU cores. This applies to all storage tiers of this tablet.
More RAM
On the bright side, this iPad Air now has more RAM than before, as it now features 12GB RAM compared to the 8GB RAM on the previous M3 model. This should allow for improved multitasking, especially with larger apps such as Final Cut Pro and all the other apps from Apple Creator Studio.
Cellular, Wireless, and Expansion
As mentioned before, this iPad Air follows suit of the higher-end iPad Pro by featuring Apple’s N1 wireless networking chip and C1X cellular modem. This means the iPad Air will get the next generation standards: Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as support for Thread.
The USB-C port on this iPad Air continues to support only USB 3 speeds (up to 10Gb/s), so no Thunderbolt support.
Storage configurations
Unlike the standard iPhone 17 and the just-announced iPhone 17e, which made 256GB the base storage, this iPad Air continues to start at 128GB of storage, which seemed to be notorious for a mid-level tablet, especially with all the large applications you’d be loading on this iPad. However, the prices for each of the storage configurations remain unchanged as before.
Conclusion
So that’s all the tidbits you need to know about the iPad Air (M4). Pre-orders for the iPad Air start on Wednesday, March 4, and it’ll be available to customers starting next Wednesday, March 11.
