Gizmodo’s first impressions of Apple’s 64-bit iPad Air: Big never felt so small and light

13 years ago

“It’s fitting for the iPad Air to have a new name, because it feels like an almost entirely new device. And for every second the Air sits in your hands, the iPads that came before it feel older and older and older,” Eric Limer writes for Gizmodo. “The iPad Air is light. Like, really light. One pound to its predecessor’s one and a half. That’s immediately evident as soon as you pick it up, but it’s only once you feel the two side-by-side—or even back to back—that the sheer magnitude of the change really hits you. If this iPad is an Air, the previous generations are slabs of rock.”

“All in all the iPad Air’s lightness makes all one-handed contortions instantly more viable than they ever were before, and that’s fantastic,” Limer writes. “But it’s not just light. It’s also smaller in every dimension, and the effect is twofold: the beautiful 264 PPI screen feels more giant than ever and still looks wonderful even in comparison the army of phone screens that are repping increasingly dense resolutions.”

“Of course all that would be pretty worthless if it wasn’t for good guts. It’s got them. This thing can cook. Apple’s A7 chip is no slouch, and it zips right along almost as beautifully here as it does inside the iPhone 5S. Even with more than twice as much screen and tons more pixels to push, the A7 still rocks,” Limer writes. “Of course, the 4th generation iPad with its A6x processor wasn’t exactly a slowpoke—and it still isn’t—but just a few minutes with the iPad Air really highlights its predecessor’s age.”

Read more in the full article here.