M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad

The iPad Air has done a lot of things over the past decade. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Air had just been released. The iPadand the “Air” label simply indicated how much lighter and sleeker they were than the original iPad from 2010 and the long-lived iPad 2 from 2011. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple pointed out. about the introduction and development of the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but returned in 2019 as a mid-tier model to fill the gap between the $329 iPad (which is no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first generation Air design) and more expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It made perfect sense to have a hardware offering to bridge the gap between the basic, no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could complicate things. The main problem in recent years has been the base Air’s 64GB of storage – meager enough that memory swapping doesn’t even work – and the fact that upgrading to 256GB brought the Air the price of the 11. 3-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 iPad Air M2, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by increasing the Air’s base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any price overlap (only the 11-inch Air 1TB, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers: the 10th generation iPad, now $349, still does everything the iPad does. better for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a gaming, video streaming, and casual browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). ButThe M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the full scope of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac.

Not quite a latest generation iPad Pro

The new iPad Airs have a lot in common with the 2022 iPad Pro M2. They have the same screen sizes and resolutions, the same basic design, they work with the same old Magic Keyboard accessories (not the new ones with the rows of functions, metal wrist rests and larger trackpads, reserved for the iPad Pro), and they obviously have the same Apple M2 chip.

In terms of performance, nothing we saw in the tests we ran was surprising; The M2’s CPU and (especially) GPU are a solid generational leap over the M1, and the M1 is already generally overkill for the vast majority of iPad apps. Both the M3 and M4 are significantly faster than the M2, but the M2 is unquestionably powerful enough to do everything people currently use iPads for.

That said, Apple’s decision to use an older chip rather than the M3 or M4 means the new Airs are coming to the world without some capabilities that have been brought to other Apple products announced over the past six months approximately. This list includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the GPU, hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec decoding, and most importantly, a faster neural engine to help power all the AI ​​elements than Apple products resume in the major software updates this fall.

The Air’s 13-inch screen has the same resolution and pixel density (2732 × 2048, 264 PPI) as the last-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And unlike the 13-inch Pro, which is actually a 13-inch screen, Apple’s tech specs page says the 13-inch Air still uses a 12.9-inch screen, and Apple simply rounds up to get to 13 .

The 13-inch Air display shares other elements with the last-generation iPad Pro’s display, including P3 color, a peak brightness of 600 nits. Its display panel has been laminated to the front glass, and it has an anti-glare coating (two of the Air’s subtle but important quality improvements that the $349 10th-generation iPad doesn’t have). But otherwise it’s not the same panel as the M2 Pro; there’s no mini LED, no HDR support, and no 120Hz ProMotion support.