There’s a clear running theme throughout Apple’s big week of announcements. Everything except the MacBook Neo is a spec bump refresh that keeps the previous design.
The iPhone 17e got MagSafe and double the storage; the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros have faster performance from the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips; the Apple Studio Display has an XDR model with mini LED, 120Hz, and HDR; the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs got the faster M5 chip. The same applies to the new iPad Airs—same design with faster M4 chips.
Along with all of the other products at Apple’s showcase on Wednesday, I spent a few minutes messing around with the M4 iPad Air in both the 11- and 13-inch varieties.
If you’ve been to an Apple Store and touched any of the iPad Airs with M-series silicon or own them yourself, these look and feel exactly the same. They’re the same aluminum slates, in the same four colors (space gray, blue, purple and starlight), with the same bezels. They have the same Liquid Retina displays with the same 12-megapixel Center Stage camera on the front and the same 12-megapixel wide camera on the rear. They have the same Touch ID in the power button and the same stereo speakers, and support the same Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil (USB-C). They also work with the same Magic Keyboard accessories.
Quick, count how many times I wrote “same.” Now, take a shot for each time. Are you drunk? Yes? You should be, because that’s the M4 iPad Air hardware—it’s the same as the M3 version.
The M4 chip is the main upgrade. The CPU is about 20 to 30% faster and the GPU is around 15% faster. You’re not going to notice a big difference for basic iPad things like web browsing or streaming videos and music, but if you’re the kind of creative person messing around with apps like Pixelmator Pro or Final Cut Pro, you’re going to see large files are easier to manipulate.
Both the M4 chip and M3 chip have 8-core CPUs and 9-core GPUs, but the new iPad Airs have more RAM. You now get 12GB of unified memory instead of 8GB. This will be beneficial for Apple Intelligence features or if you’re messing with LLMs or AI apps. I don’t use my iPads for these kinds of things, so it’s not really something that calls out to me. However, I was shown a few app demos that showed the responsiveness of the M4 iPad apps due to the faster chip and extra RAM. It’s good if you’re coming from a much older iPad that’s running sluggish.
The new M4 iPad Airs are fine. Just fine. Are they groundbreaking? No, but that’s the same for the iPhone 17e, M5 Pro/M5 Max MacBook Pros, M5 MacBook Air, and Apple Studio Displays. This is just where most of Apple’s hardware is right now: mature, polished, and only in need of performance bumps every year or so.