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:
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
The lack of multi-user support on iPads is truly mind-boggling. Especially after the introduction of the Pro and Air variants, and the positioning of iPads as full-blown “serious” computing devices.
Apple has already done the work to build multi-user iPad functionality for school use (“Classroom”)… so what possible reason could there be not to roll it out for all iPads? Serious question. And no, I don’t think “in order to drive sales of more devices” makes sense as an answer. A more useful iPad would sell better.
Very disappointed we're going another year in the Air line with 60Hz displays. I know they are not apples to apples because it was a much worse TN panel, but I got a 144Hz monitor that overclocked to 165Hz a decade ago. Speaking of a decade ago, Face ID is allegedly still prohibitively expensive, but I think it's also well past due to move down to the iPad Air. The Pro line has enough distinctive features now that it doesn't need ProMotion and Face ID as tentpole differentiators.
I echo the previous commenters' sentiments.
The speed upgrades mean nothing because hardware gains are quickly overtaken by bloated OS updates within a couple years. My old iPad Pro, fast at start of its life, is now a stuttering mess that struggles to load the App Store or react with any responsiveness (+5 iOS updates later). I'm advising family to keep theirs on whatever OS it initially ships with and never update, which Apple makes increasingly impossible with its constant nagging to update.
Who owns the device? Me, or Apple?
iPadOS continues to be the most anti-user OS project. It's like if they locked down macOS and funneled you through only the App Store, while also gimping all the power and possibility that macOS offers, while giving you Temu-quality multitasking and windowing.
iPad had potential as a netbook killer but iOS shackles it and Apple is afraid of doing anything more with it.
I agree it is absurd not to have multiple user accounts on iPad. Sure an iPhone is a personal item but an iPad might be used for a whole household. However I do value touch-ID on most iPads. It would be obnoxious to have to hold it up and smile for the camera on a tablet that might be used while lying down on a couch or etc. My dad has an iPad Pro that does have Face-ID and often as he holds it in portrait mode his thumb covers the camera!
The only reason I can think of for why multi-user support is being withheld from iPads, is that Apple thinks of multi-user as a “premium” feature, and Macs are still considered more “premium” than iPads. But that’s nuts… plenty of iPad configurations are way more expensive than some of the lower-end Mac configurations, eg. the new budget-friendly laptop expected to be announced tomorrow.
Is the iPad a toy, or a full-blown computing device, suitable for pro workflows? Apple apparently hasn’t made up its mind.
Glad to see I’m not the only one bothered by the 60Hz panel and lack of multi user support.
They even showed how to do it with the latest tvOS. And they have clearly put tvOS and Apple TV hardware on the back burner so why not now.
Maybe they’re holding that back for HomePad which is in turn being held back by Siri.
At this point an iPad makes a better tv than a tv because as annoying as iPadOS is, it’s still miles ahead of Roku or Fire or Android or even tvOS at this point.
