It isn’t the update that most Apple watchers were hoping for, however immediately, Apple introduced upgrades to 2 of its iPads, together with the usual iPad and the quirky center little one, the iPad Air.

The iPad Air strikes up from an M2 in last year’s Air refresh to an M3 chip, which is able to Apple Intelligence and extra graphics rendering. The Magic Keyboard will get a brand new format with a bigger trackpad and a bodily perform key row.

iPad Air and its Magic Keyboard.

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That is a notable improve for anyone doing actual, portable-minded work with an iPad, however there’s even higher information: The new Magic Keyboard with these bodily keys is backward-compatible with earlier iPad Airs: 4th and fifth era, 11-inch M2 and M3, and 13-inch M2 and M3 fashions (higher information, that’s, when you’re good with the $270 worth).

The brand new Airs ship in the identical 11- and 13-inch sizes. Apple’s messaging about the new Air promotes the graphic efficiency of the M3 chip, saying it gives “as much as 40 p.c quicker graphics efficiency over M1” and help for issues like hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing. Maybe extra realistically than promising critical gaming on native iPad apps, Apple touts 4 instances the efficiency of an M1 iPad Air for “graphics-intensive rendering workflows.”