There is not much new in Apple's newest renewal from the iPad Air, so there is not much to be said about it, but it is worth taking a short look anyway.
In almost all ways this is identical to the previous generation. There are only two differences to pass: the bump from the M2 chip to the slightly faster M3 and a redesign of the magical keyboard-bound format.
If you want more details about this tablet, consult our M2 iPad Air review last year. Everything we said now applies.
From m2 to m3
The M3 chip has an 8-core CPU with four performance centers and four efficiency scores. There are nine cores on the GPU side. There is also a 16-core neural engine, which Apple calls its NPU.
We have previously seen the M3 in other devices and it performs here comparable in the iPad Air in Geekbench -Benchmarks. Those who come from the M1 or older A-series chips will see a number of large profits, but it is a subtle step above the M2 in last year's iPad Air.
That will be a noticeable boost, mainly for a handful of particularly demanding 3D games (people like Assassin's Creed Mirage, Resident Evil Village” Infinity NikkiAnd GENHIN -IMPORT) And some heavy applications that only use a few people, such as CAD or video editing programs.
However, the majority of the target group of the iPad Air would never know the difference, and the most important advantage here is not necessarily real performance. Instead, the advantage of this upgrade is the addition of a few specific functions, namely hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing and hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec support.
This is not new, but this chip supports Apple Intelligence, the many-Ballyhooed suite of generative AI functions that Apple recently introduced. At the moment there are not many devices in Apple's line-up that do not support Apple Intelligence (it is really just the cheapest, entry-level IPAD that it does not have) and that is good news for Apple, because it helps the company simplify its marketing messages around the functions.
