Apple iPad Air (M4) Review: The Ultimate iPad | WIRED
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Rating:7/10
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WIRED
The M4 is supremely powerful. 12 GB of RAM is handy. The hardware and screen aren’t new, but it still looks and feels great. Better accessories than the base iPad.
TIRED
Magic Keyboard is expensive, and the palm rests are too small. Having no Face ID is inconvenient, especially without Touch ID on the keyboard.
The iPad Air has always had to walk on egg shells. It can’t step on the toes of the iPad Pro or MacBook Air. It can't go cheaper either, so as not to offend the base iPad. That's not to mention the brand-new MacBook Neo, which has been stealing the limelight and was introduced at the exact same price as the iPad Air. With all those competing products muddying the waters, you might be wondering where the iPad Air fits these days.
The 2026 iPad Air is the latest refresh in Apple’s iPad lineup, bringing the M4 chip into the mix. That is in line with the way Apple keeps the iPad one generation behind the MacBooks and iPad Pro. Is it a boring update? Absolutely. But the iPad Air remains a highly enjoyable tablet to use.
More Than You Need
Photograph: Luke Larsen
In many ways, the iPad Air is the ultimate iPad. You might think that would be the iPad Pro, but given the price and advanced feature set, the iPad Pro really makes sense only for professionals who have a specific use case for the M5 performance, HDR-capable OLED screen, and more powerful USB-C port. Unless you plan to do something like bring your iPad out to a video shoot to handle multiple 4K live video streams, the iPad Pro is probably overkill. I’m not saying you won’t enjoy the insane brightness of the tandem OLED for videos, games, and movies—it just won't be a deal-breaker for most people.
In terms of staying true to the intent of what the iPad has always been, the iPad Air reigns supreme. Even the M4 in the iPad Air is a bit overkill for what the vast majority of people will use an iPad for. You don’t need a chip that powerful to browse the web, do FaceTime calls, play Apple Arcade games, or try your hand at drawing in Adobe Illustrator.
You'll never feel the M4 iPad Air slow down in any of those tasks, and there's still plenty of headroom for more. The 12 GB of unified memory (up from 8 GB in the previous generation) that comes standard gives even more assurance that you won't be bottlenecked. If you intend to use the iPad Air as your main device, whether that’s for school or work, there’s plenty of performance here to last many years. That's especially true now with the windowing and cursor updates in iPadOS 18, which make it feel more like a Mac than ever.
If there's a noticeable difference with the M4 over the M3, it's definitely on the GPU front. I had just the game in mind to try on it: Oceanhorn 3, one of the most graphically intense Apple Arcade titles to come out recently. Unlike many mobile games, it offers some different preset graphics settings to change between, which is helpful for trying to test the limits of the performance. In the Balanced mode, which sets the render scaling to 60 percent, the frame rate felt nice and smooth. At 80 percent scaling, though, the frame rate dropped, and it felt choppy. For reference, the M4 in the 13-inch MacBook Air performs stronger in some gaming benchmarks, up to 13 percent in 3DMark Steel Nomad Light, for example.
GPU performance isn’t only about gaming, though, as it also speeds up everything from video rendering and 3D modeling to on-device AI processing. If you're coming from an M1 or M2 iPad Air, you'll feel the difference. Then again, are people using the iPad Air for such tasks? Those don’t sound like things you casually do on a tablet on the go. But hey, you can do whatever you want with your iPad, and the M4 iPad Air just happens to allow you to do quite a lot. My guess, though, is that most people will be hard-pressed to fully utilize the capabilities of the M4—again, outside of playing a game.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
There are a few practical reasons to buy this over the much cheaper base iPad. If you plan on using your iPad for any amount of “real work”—or even just activities you would normally do on a laptop—the iPad Air M4 is the one you want. If you do want to occasionally work on this thing, opt for the larger 13-inch screen, which is what I tested.
Beyond performance and screen size, the iPad Air also gets you better accessories, such as the Magic Keyboard and the Apple Pencil Pro over what you can get with the base iPad. I'm not someone who will be able to appreciate the Apple Pencil Pro over the standard model—outside of the addition of Find My, which is an awesome addition. My wife, however, is an artist who actually did. She spent