Apple iPad Air (M4) review: The perfect iPad

In terms of staying true to the purpose of what iPad has always been, the iPad Air reigns supreme. Even the M4 in the iPad Air is a bit of an overkill for what the vast majority of people will use the iPad for. You don’t need a powerful chip to surf the web, make FaceTime calls, play Apple Arcade games, or try your hand at drawing in Adobe Illustrator.

You’ll never feel like the M4 iPad Air is slowing down at any of these tasks, and there’s still plenty of room for more. The 12GB of unified memory (vs. 8GB in the previous generation) that comes standard provides greater assurance that you won’t get throttled. 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 for many years. This is especially true now with window and cursor updates iPad OS 18making it feel more like a Mac than ever before.

If there’s a noticeable difference between the M4 and M3, it’s definitely on the GPU front. I just had the game in mind to try: Oceanhorn 3one of the most graphically intense Apple Arcade titles released recently. Unlike many mobile games, it offers a few different preset graphics settings to change between, which is useful for trying to test the limits of performance. In Balanced mode, which sets the display size to 60 percent, the frame rate looks nice and smooth. However, when measured at 80 percent, the frame rate dropped, and it looked choppy. For reference, the M4 in the 13-inch MacBook Air delivers stronger performance in some gaming benchmarks, up to 13 percent in 3DMark Steel Nomad Light, for example.

The GPU’s performance isn’t just limited to gaming, it also accelerates everything from video rendering and 3D modeling to on-device AI processing. If you’re coming from an iPad Air M1 or M2, you’ll feel the difference. Then again, do people use the iPad Air for such tasks? These don’t feel like things you do casually on a tablet on the go. But hey, you can do whatever you want with your iPad, and the M4 iPad Air happens to let you do a lot more. However, I think most people would be hard-pressed to take full advantage of the M4’s capabilities, again, outside of playing the game.

Photo: Luke Larsen