Apple (Hacker News):
iPad Air with M3 empowers users to be productive and creative wherever they are, from aspiring creatives using demanding apps and working with large files, to travelers editing content on the go. The powerful M3 chip offers a number of improvements over M1 and previous-generation models. Featuring a more powerful 8-core CPU, M3 is up to 35 percent faster for multithreaded CPU workflows than iPad Air with M1.
Though note that the model it replaces had an M2.
Joe Rossignol:
With the M3 chip, the new iPad Air should offer up to 20% faster performance compared to the previous-generation model with the M2 chip, which was released in May 2024. In addition, the M3 chip brings hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the iPad Air for the first time, providing improved graphics rendering in games.
[…]
We have yet to discover any other changes for the new iPad Air beyond the M3 chip and the updated Magic Keyboard.
[…]
In the U.S., the 11-inch model continues to start at $599, and the 13-inch model continues to start at $799. The device remains available in the same Space Gray, Starlight, Blue, and Purple color options that were offered for the previous model.
Dan Moren:
It’s definitely a muted update, which is no surprise as it comes just nine months after the introduction of the M2 iPad Air last May. The use of the M3 processor is also somewhat surprising, given that it’s based on an outdated manufacturing process that Apple has otherwise been aggressive about transitioning away from on the rest of its product line.
Matt Birchler:
My Mac does everything I could imagine, so when you show me a Mac that looks exactly like what I already have but is way faster, then I go “hell yeah, gimme that!” But when you show me a faster iPad, I largely go, “well, speed isn’t what I feel holds me back on the iPad, it’s the software.” My evidence is literally every iPad review in the past 10 years.
Hartley Charlton:
The new keyboard features a larger built-in trackpad, a 14-key function row, and a new aluminum hinge.
Devon Dundee:
It’s great to see these features from the iPad Pro’s Magic Keyboard make their way to the iPad Air. At the same time, the Air version does include some compromises, most notably its omission of backlit keys. It also lacks the aluminum palm rest and trackpad haptic feedback found on the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, and it only comes in a single color option: white.
The iPad Air’s Magic Keyboard is marginally cheaper than the iPad Pro version (and the Magic Keyboard for last year’s iPad Air), costing $30 less at $269 for the 11-inch version and $319 for the 13-inch version.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-05): John Gruber:
$269 feels like a crummy deal. The new-from-last-year $299 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, with an aluminum top, feels way more than $30 better than the old-style silicone-covered ones like this new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air. It kind of feels like a design failure of some sort that these new iPad Airs can’t use the same Magic Keyboards as the iPad Pros of the same size.
Apple Hardware Announcement Apple M3 iPad Air iPadOS iPadOS 18
Apple:
Apple today also updated iPad with double the starting storage and the A16 chip, bringing even more value to customers. The A16 chip provides a jump in performance for everyday tasks and experiences in iPadOS, while still providing all-day battery life. Compared to the previous generation, the updated iPad with A16 is nearly 30 percent faster.
Hartley Charlton:
The new iPad starts with 128GB of storage, and is also available in 256GB and a new 512GB configuration. The previous model was only available in 64GB and 256GB configurations.
It is available in blue, pink, yellow, and silver, and continues to start at $349.
Craig Grannell:
Given how important Apple Intelligence seemingly is to Apple, I’m floored that the new iPad doesn’t support it. Baffling.
Adam Engst:
Frankly, I can’t see that many people with functional iPads purchased in the last four or five years will benefit greatly from upgrading to a newer model. Either their current iPad still works well enough, or performance issues will push them towards the iPad Air.
However, as an affordable entry point to the lineup, the 11th-generation iPad becomes even more appealing with the A16 chip and 128 GB of storage (up from 64 GB) for the $349 base model.
[…]
Although the screen size has not changed—it still measures 9.79-by-7.07 inches, with a 2360-by-1640-pixel resolution at 264 ppi—Apple is now referring to it as “11-inch” instead of “10.9-inch.”
Previously:
Apple A16 Apple Hardware Announcement Apple Intelligence iPad iPadOS iPadOS 18
Eliseo Martelli (via Hacker News, Reddit):
As a long-time Apple user, I’ve always appreciated the integration of hardware and software, signature of the Apple ecosystem. However, recent experiences with my iPad Air 11" M2 has left me questioning whether Apple has lost sight of what once made their products great.
[…]
The performance issues don’t stop at sluggish response times. During these
use cases, my iPad overheated, making it uncomfortable to
hold or even rest the palm on, raising concerns about potential long-term
hardware damage.
What made this particularly frustrating is that these aren’t third-party
applications pushing the hardware to its limits. These are Apple’s own
applications that should be theoretically optimized for their hardware.
[…]
Since my original complaint, I’ve discovered
numerous forum threads
and social media discussions from iPad users experiencing similar issues. This
suggests a systemic problem rather than isolated incidents.
Francisco Tolmasky:
This is such a funny way of saying
“The Apple Store’s first and only troubleshooting step for Apple Notes being slow on my iPad was to give me a brand new iPad, but Notes just overheated that iPad too, so we realized that Notes is just crap.”
yalok:
This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.
Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.
Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.
Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.
Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.
RIPreason:
Chamath’s new iPhone bricks constantly and he has difficulty performing basic functions like calling his wife.
In 2024, the way to get bugs fixed on an iPhone is to be a billionaire and rant about it in a top podcast.
[…]
I disagree with Chamath about the problem. The problem is not due to a lack of testing, but a bloated culture infected with careerism and empire-building. And unfortunately, nobody climbs the ladder for shipping quality. You can’t point to quality like you can point to the useless new button they added, or the touchbar, etc.
Dave B.:
Apple used to be a UX company. The entire foundation of the company was “How can man interact with machine to improve all our lives?” and that was done via intuitive software and clever hardware input mechanisms. Supply chain, marketing, and even engineering were all done in service of that goal.
Today, that has utterly flipped.
Design and UX feel like they’re just a department off to the side somewhere, while the crux of the company’s existence is “How can we build efficient supply chains and sell many SKUs via effective marketing?”
Previously:
Apple M2 Apple Software Quality Freeform iOS iOS 18 iPadOS iPadOS 18 Notes Phone.app Photos.app
Linus Tech Tips:
Linus takes a long-overdue trip back into the iOS ecosystem. Will daily-driving a shiny new iPhone 16 Plus for an entire month convert him into Apple’s newest fan?
[…]
“I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with market slogans like, ‘It just works,’ as though they actually believe them. And it made me wonder does Apple have one version of their products for the True Believers and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices unnecessarily limited functionality and some of the weirdest bugs that I’ve have encountered on a supposedly finished product[…]”
Via John Gruber (Mastodon):
Sebastian is a long-time Android user, but he’s not really a phone guy at all. He doesn’t review phones, typically. His own personal Android phone is several years old. His interest and renown is entirely in the field of PCs. So his video isn’t really “Android power user reviews iOS”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month”.
[…]
He complains repeatedly about iOS’s animated transitions making everything feel slow. That’s 100 percent true. As an everyday iPhone user I’m just completely used to that. But those animations really do make iPhones feel slower than they are. In terms of tech specs iPhones are literally the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s A-series silicon is, and always has been, years ahead of the best silicon money can buy in an Android handset. But a lot of aspects of iOS feel slower than Android because of animated transitions for which iOS offers no option to speed up. It should. And the Accessibility setting to completely turn off animations doesn’t solve the problem; what I want, and I think what Sebastian wants, is faster animations.
[…]
Again, it didn’t leave me with an iota of envy for life on the Android side of the fence, but it reminded me about a bunch of things on iOS that don’t make sense, and seemingly are the way they are only because that’s how they always have been.
Kirk McElhearn:
When was the last time Apple used the phrase “It just works” in marketing? More than a decade ago? If anything, people used that to Mark Apple. Citing that as an apple marketing term it’s just wrong. It’s more a meme than anything else now.
I recently set up a brand new iPad for my father, and we ran into a dozen or so bugs just between plugging it in and getting the built-in apps working. (The impetus for the iPad was that he needed a backup device for travel because Mail on his iPhone was unreliable. Messages were displayed incompletely, and after trying to fix this by deleting and re-adding the account, he was unable to re-add it because the settings screen kept going blank. Webmail in Safari didn’t fully work because the screen was too small. Eventually Mail did re-add the account but would only load a few of the mailboxes, until a month later when everything suddenly worked again.)
Anyway, with the iPad, the first problem was that the proximity pairing to copy the settings from his iPhone didn’t work. The iPad offered it, but then it wouldn’t actually start the process. We finally had to cancel, and then no amount of waving the devices together would get it offer the option again.
In configuring the settings manually, a variety of buttons just didn’t respond. Some controls that were supposed to be enabled weren’t. The account setup sheet in Mail kept spontaneously closing, and then we would have to re-open it and type in everything again. App icons wouldn’t drag out of the search onto the home screen. Various iCloud services would neither sync nor show why they weren’t syncing and then spontaneously turned themselves off. It took several hours to activate the cellular service. On the plus side, Safari is really really fast compared with his Intel MacBook Air, and the AT&T plan is only $21/month for unlimited data.
The old 1Password stopped Dropbox-syncing on his iPhone and couldn’t be installed on the iPad, so this seemed like a good time to switch to Apple’s password manager. The MacBook Air can’t run Sequoia, so the Passwords app is unavailable, but we were able to update it to Sonoma, which has the password manager in Safari’s Settings. Right after updating, the Mac kept getting stuck at the login screen: it would accept the password but then sort of half-reboot and end up at the login screen again. After four cycles of this it just started working.
In order to use the latest importer, I set up temporary account on a Sequoia Mac to import from 1Password to the Passwords app. It reported lots of errors because of items that didn’t have the URL entered properly and because sometimes there were multiple accounts for the same site. There was no way to copy or export the list of errors to go back to 1Password and fix them. I wish it had just imported everything, sticking any unknown or error information into the notes, so that I could fix it up later in the Passwords app. Instead, I had to keep going to 1Password to fix things and retrying the export until all the errors were fixed. Then I realized that the 1Password CSV export doesn’t include the notes, so I copied and pasted those individually via screen sharing. We also backed up all the 1Password stuff to a giant PDF in case it turns out that something didn’t import properly.
The next problem was that Photos on the Mac wouldn’t sync with iCloud. It would just say “Syncing with iCloud paused. Mac needs to cool down.” I don’t know what that means or what I was meant to do. The MacBook Air was plugged in and did not seem to be overheated—the fan was not running, and Activity Monitor did not show high CPU use. Why would syncing cause overheating, anyway? Isn’t that primarily a network task?
Lastly, we ran into trouble seeing up a new flash drive for Time Machine. The drive came formatted for Windows. I thought macOS used to offer to use a newly attached drive for Time Machine, but it didn't. There was no option to erase it as APFS. I was able to format it as HFS+, but Disk Utility’s Convert to APFS command kept failing with an error. Eventually I remembered that you have to use View ‣ Show All Devices before you can change the partition scheme from Master Boot Record to GUID Partition Map. Then I was able to Erase it as APFS.
The final part of the story is that, some days later, his iPhone updated to the latest version of iOS. Mail auto-enabled the new categories feature, and he was completely confused as to why the number of messages shown in each mailbox was suddenly different and couldn’t figure out how to get it to show all the messages. I was able to explain how to swipe sideways to show the hidden All Messages button. But I was confused myself because I thought this was an Apple Intelligence feature and so it was only available on iPhone 15 Pro and later, not on an iPhone SE.
Previously:
1Password Accessibility Android Apple File System (APFS) Apple Intelligence Apple Password Manager Apple Software Quality Bug Design Disk Utility iCloud iOS iOS 18 iPad iPadOS iPadOS 18 iPhone 16 Plus Mac macOS 14 Sonoma MobileMail MobileSafari Time Machine
