Apple’s M2 iPad Air: ‘All the iPad most people will need’ – Ars Technica
Now available in two sizes for the first time, the new iPad Air with M2 is more powerful and versatile than ever, featuring phenomenal performance, a landscape front-facing camera, and faster Wi-Fi, along with support for Apple Pencil Pro.
Apple this month revealed the redesigned 11-inch and all-new 13-inch iPad Air, supercharged by the M2 chip. Now available in two sizes for the first time, the 11-inch iPad Air is super-portable, and the 13-inch model provides an even larger display for more room to work, learn, and play. Both deliver phenomenal performance and advanced capabilities, making iPad Air more powerful and versatile than ever before. Featuring a faster CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine in M2, the new iPad Air offers even more performance and is an incredibly powerful device for artificial intelligence.
The front-facing Ultra Wide 12MP camera with Center Stage is now located along the landscape edge of iPad Air, which is perfect for video calls. It also includes faster Wi-Fi, and cellular models include super-fast 5G, so users can stay connected on the go. With a portable design, all-day battery life, a brilliant Liquid Retina display, and support for Apple Pencil Pro, Apple Pencil (USB-C), and Magic Keyboard, iPad Air empowers users to be even more productive and creative. The new iPad Air is available in new blue and purple finishes, along with starlight and space gray.
The new iPad Air is available in space gray and starlight, in addition to new purple and blue finishes.
Samuel Axon for Ars Technica:
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call the new Airs the “default” iPad for most buyers—the now-$349 10th-gen iPad still does everything the iPad is best at for less money, and it’s still all you really need if you just want a casual gaming, video streaming, and browsing tablet (or a tablet for a kid). But the M2 Air is the iPad that best covers the totality of everything the iPad can do from its awkward perch, stuck halfway between the form and function of the iPhone and the Mac…
The new iPad Airs are a great bridge between the basic $349 iPad and the technically impressive but much more expensive M4 iPad Pros. Both of the Airs are (relatively speaking) inexpensive enough to be justifiable for people who buy iPads mainly to watch or read things but also powerful enough to run the handful of high-end pro apps that Apple, Adobe, and a handful of others make available for iPadOS.
As a Mac user for many years, my biggest problem with the iPad Air as a laptop replacement is still iPadOS, which still feels more restrictive and less flexible than I need it to be. Apple could resolve this with software, but you could say that about virtually any iPad Pro released in the last nine years. Don’t buy this or any iPad unless you already know you can live with the current limitations of iPadOS.
Presuming you have done that, the new Airs span many possible uses, from premium streaming screen to professional drawing tablet to laptop replacement. Their versatility means that the M2 iPad Air is definitely where you should start looking if you’re buying an iPad, even if you end up going with a basic model or a Pro instead.
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