iPad Air (M4, 8th Generation)
Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News):
With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3x faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X, delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative anywhere.
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With the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible value.
Kicking off a week of product announcements, the new iPad Air has arrived, but if you go see it at the Apple Store, you’d be hard-pressed to know if Apple actually switched out the old models. They have the same dimensions, same colors, and same displays, have the same prices, and the same tagline on Apple’s website.
All the major improvements are under the hood. In addition to the M4 processor’s 30-percent performance improvement, there’s now 12GB of unified RAM—up from 8GB of memory in the M3 Air—and memory bandwidth of 120GB/s, compared to the 100GB/s offered by the earlier model. The M4 also unlocks hardware acceleration for 8K in more formats, including H.264, ProRes, and ProRes RAW.
With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.
What’s notable about this time is that this is actually the second year in a row where I’ve basically been able to say the same thing. Last year’s M3 iPad Air was also just a processor swap over the M2 version.
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The 128GB base storage is not great for a premium tablet like this. We saw Apple bump their budget iPhone up to 256GB base storage today, so why not their second-highest end iPad?
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The 60Hz display is getting pretty damn long in the tooth. It’s fiiiiine, but at some point it’s time to get an upgrade. The Air has had the literal exact screen for 7 years now.
This version of the Apple M4 is slightly cut down compared to the version that ships in Macs or that came with the M4 iPad Pro. It has only 8 CPU cores—3 high-performance cores and 5 efficiency cores, down from a maximum of and 4 and 6. It also uses 9 GPU cores instead of 10, and there isn’t an Air variant with 16GB of RAM. A 16GB RAM configuration was available for M4 iPad Pros with 1TB or 2TB of storage.
The iPad would go from a never-buy to a buy-right-away for me, if they added user profiles. It’d be a nice thing to have on your coffee table, where anyone in the household can pick it up and be logged into all of their stuff.
Windows XP had this feature. Chromebooks have this feature. It’s inexcusable that such an expensive gadget can only have one user.
Previously:
