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Apple is gearing up for a series of product announcements on Wednesday. So, naturally, the company revealed two of those products on Monday. There’s the iPhone 17e, Apple’s latest “affordable” iPhone, which largely just updates the chip to the A19. In the same vein, the company is updating its iPad Air line with the M4 chip. If you’re hoping for other big iPad Air upgrades, however, keep waiting.
The iPad Air is the same, just now with M4
If you put the M4 iPad Air side-by-side with the M3 iPad Air, you might mix the two up. That’s because Apple has changed virtually nothing about the overall design and appearance of these tablets. The 11-inch M4 Air looks like the 11-inch M3 Air, as do the two 13-inch variants.
Just about the only thing new about the M4 Air, is, well, M4. This isn’t Apple’s newest chip—that would be the M5—but the M4 is one generation newer than the M3, so you should expect some performance gains between the two. The M4 chip in the Air comes with an eight-core CPU with three performance cores and five efficiency cores, a nine-core GPU, 120GB/s memory bandwidth, and 12GB of RAM. That’s one less performance core than the M3 Air, but one more efficiency core. What’s likely going to be more dramatic is the extra 4GB of RAM, as the M3 Air only comes with 8GB. You should be able to run more tasks at once on the new Air without iPadOS needing to refresh an app or page.
We won’t know exactly how those changes will affect performance until testers get their hands on the M4 iPad Airs. However, Apple says the new iPad is up to 30% faster than the previous generation, and up to 2.3 times faster than the M1 iPad Air. (Apple tends to compare its latest products to those from multiple generations past, as the difference is often more subtle from generation to generation). To me, that means this is certainly not an iPad that M3 Air users need to consider upgrading to, but if it would likely be a good option for anyone with an older Air—or older iPad—to jump to.
With that M4 chip, Apple is adding the N1 chip and C1X modem to the iPad Air. The N1 chip comes with all M4 iPad Airs, and supports standards like Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, a smart home standard. If you buy the cellular iPad Air, you’ll get C1X, Apple’s in-house modem that it says is 30% more efficient than the modem in the M3 iPad Air.
What do you think so far?
Aside from those points, this is the same iPad Air as the M3 model. It comes in an 11- or 13-inch option, with 12MP rear and front cameras; USB-C connectivity with Touch ID; the same battery life (Apple says 10 hours of video playback); and both still start with 128GB of storage. And, notably, it still omits a high-refresh 120Hz display for the usual 60Hz. That’s disappointing.
How to buy the M4 iPad Air
You can preorder an M4 iPad Air on March 4, starting at $599 (the same starting price as Apple’s newly-announced iPhone 17e) for the 11-inch 128GB model. The 13-inch starts at $799 for the 128GB model. Adding cellular adds $150 to the price. Apple says that the M4 iPad Air will officially launch on Wednesday, March 11—the same day as the iPhone 17e, as well as Samsung’s Galaxy S26 series.
