- 11- and 13-inch iPad Air tablets get the M3
- This adds support for new Magic Keyboard
- Pricing unchanged since last models
Not even 24 hours after Tim Cook teased, "There’s something in the AIR,” Apple’s just made its next-generation iPad Air official. Along with getting the M3 chip, it still comes in several fun, poppy colors and now supports the ‘new’ Magic Keyboard, which was initially launched alongside the iPad Pro M4.
Now, this is a pretty early refresh for the iPad Air, considering it was upgraded to the M2 chip and a refreshed design on May 7, 2024. Still, it’s clearly popular within the lineup and is now getting an even more powerful chip to make all sorts of tasks even more fluid.
It’s still available in either an 11-inch or 13-inch size, allowing you to pick what best fits your needs, and there is no price increase year over year. The 11-inch model starts at $599 in the United States, while the 13-inch is $799 (starting), both start at 128GB storage and come in Blue, Purple, Starlight, or Space Gray.
The screens are still Liquid Retina displays, meaning no Dynamic OLED like on the iPad Pro. However, they offer a vibrant and crisp experience with an anti-reflective coating standard. They also support the P3 Wide Color gamut and True Tone, which will automatically adjust the color temperature to your space. This is all quite nice to have, and considering this still supports the Apple Pencil Pro, you can hover over the screen to see what impact a pen stroke might have before committing to it.
What the M3 means
As far as the M3 chip goes, it’s an 8-core CPU – split between 4 performance, 4 efficiency cores, a 9-core GPU with support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and a 16-core Neural Engine. Plus, Apple has even confirmed that the new iPad Air ships with 8GB of RAM out of the box. Suffice to say, this should be plenty of power for everyday performance in iPadOS 18, for the Stage Manager multitasking experience, and for Apple Intelligence features. Remember, the iPad Air with M2 was no slouch, but this should future-proof the device even further.
The iPad Air still sticks with a Touch ID sensor baked into the power button for easy authentication or unlocking, but it does keep the 12-megapixel front-facing camera on the horizontal spot, meaning that this device is best used in landscape mode.
And that's why ushering in a whole new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Air makes so much sense. It's still the same square footage and in fact, backward compatible with the M2 iPad Air's, but Apple's plopped in a larger trackpad and 14 function keys at the top. Think quick keys for brightness, playback, microphone, and volume.
Another welcome change is that USB-C passthrough port now supports faster charging, but we don't know how that impacts data speeds just yet. Still a win, though! It's also a bit cheaper at $269 for the 11-inch iPad Air and a bit more at $319 for the 13-inch, but it only comes in white.
True to the older Smart Keyboards and every Magic Keyboard that Apple has offered, you won’t need to worry about charging this accessory or a pesky pairing process as it has a Smart Connector built-in. Interestingly enough, the base iPad is still the only model supporting the two-part Magic Keyboard, so it sticks with the floating design here on the iPad Air.
Rounding out the iPad Air on the rear is still a 12-megapixel camera for taking photos or videos. As far as this refresh goes though, it’s pretty much focused on giving the iPad Air even more headroom and better performance across the board courtesy of the M3 chip. In the press release, Apple calls out its performance gains not on the M2-powered iPad Air but on older models – promising up to two times faster than the M1 iPad Air and a leapfrogging three and a half times faster than the A14 Bionic model.
We’ll be going hands-on and testing the new iPad Air with M3 just as soon as we can, but for now, if you’re sold, it’s up for preorder right now and will formally launch on March 12. But if you were hoping for one more thing, Apple also gave the entry-level iPad a bit of a spec bump, but maybe most importantly kept the price the same.
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