Apple this month revealed the redesigned 11-inch and all-new 13-inch iPad Air, supercharged by the M2 chip. Now available in two sizes for the first time, the 11-inch iPad Air is super-portable, and the 13-inch model provides an even larger display for more room to work, learn, and play. Both deliver phenomenal performance and advanced capabilities, making iPad Air more powerful and versatile than ever before. Featuring a faster CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine in M2, the new iPad Air offers even more performance and is an incredibly powerful device for artificial intelligence.
The front-facing Ultra Wide 12MP camera with Center Stage is now located along the landscape edge of iPad Air, which is perfect for video calls. It also includes faster Wi-Fi, and cellular models include super-fast 5G, so users can stay connected on the go. With a portable design, all-day battery life, a brilliant Liquid Retina display, and support for Apple Pencil Pro, Apple Pencil (USB-C), and Magic Keyboard, iPad Air empowers users to be even more productive and creative. The new iPad Air is available in new blue and purple finishes, along with starlight and space gray.
Samuel Axon for Ars Technica:
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac…
The new iPad Airs are a great bridge between the basic $349 iPad and the technically impressive but much more expensive M4 iPad Pros. Both of the Airs are (relatively speaking) inexpensive enough to be justifiable for people who buy iPads mainly to watch or read things but also powerful enough to run the handful of high-end pro apps that Apple, Adobe, and a handful of others make available for iPadOS.
As a Mac user for many years, my biggest problem with the iPad Air as a laptop replacement is still iPadOS, which still feels more restrictive and less flexible than I need it to be. Apple could resolve this with software, but you could say that about virtually any iPad Pro released in the last nine years. Don’t buy this or any iPad unless you already know you can live with the current limitations of iPadOS.
Presuming you have done that, the new Airs span many possible uses, from premium streaming screen to professional drawing tablet to laptop replacement. Their versatility means that the M2 iPad Air is definitely where you should start looking if you’re buying an iPad, even if you end up going with a basic model or a Pro instead.
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for jobs sake; the m4 is as fast a an i7 from intel? it is still way to slow. SLOW! let me help apple’s processor team. your goal is to be 5 times faster than amd’s newest threadripper, and do so with less than one watt.
there may be some sleepless nights. move on 128 bit processors or 256, or 1024. your data transfer rates are anemic. we should be seeing transfer rates at 1000 terabytes per second by now. and yes with new memory subsystems to make that happen.
hey OS team, are you guys still collecting a paycheck. get on with the complete rewrite in swift.
the ipad is to be a great reader, not a great computer. it is a reader that can do a bunch of other things… you have made it unaffordable and have pushed it into the compute side, which will confuse mac sales. why? because sale dropped off. no, no, no. you only needed to get busy having publishers adopt the the platform, showing them how to use the platform. good grief. tim is so lost.
hey where is the world friendliest personal robot. it does not have to walk. it can roll. with AI what are you wait for. there are plenty of cars and they all suck, and cost way too much. for get those for the time being.
where is my Wall-E? innovate! get off the pot! steve change the name removing computer to free apple to do many more things. get on with it.
NO, the 2020/M1 iPad Pros are all most people will need. Get FaceID, better Micro-LED screens with 120hz refresh, better speakers, more RAM, lower price, etc. The only thing better about the M2 Airs is the camera placement. I even sold my M1 12.9″ because my 2020 11″ is more than enough. Pushing Airs in recent years (affiliate links galore) over the previous gen or two Pros is one of the biggest scams in tech “journalism”. Don’t pay more for an iPad/keyboard/pencil combo than what you would for a high-end netbook: >$800