There’s not a lot new in Apple’s newest refresh of the iPad Air, so there’s not a lot to say about it, however it’s price taking a short look regardless.

In virtually each means, that is an identical to the earlier era. There are solely two variations to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the marginally sooner M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral.

If you would like extra particulars about this pill, consult with our M2 iPad Air review from final yr. The whole lot we stated then applies now.

From M2 to M3

The M3 chip has an 8-core CPU with 4 efficiency cores and 4 effectivity cores. On the GPU facet, there are 9 cores. There’s additionally a 16-core Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls its NPU.

We’ve seen the M3 in different units earlier than, and it performs comparably right here within the iPad Air in Geekbench benchmarks. These coming from the M1 or older A-series chips will see some huge good points, however it’s a delicate step up over the M2 in final yr’s iPad Air.

That might be a noticeable increase primarily for a handful of notably demanding 3D video games (the likes of Murderer’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil Village, Infinity Nikki, and Genshin Affect) and a few heavy-duty purposes only some folks use, like CAD or video enhancing packages.

A lot of the iPad Air’s audience would by no means know the distinction, although, and the primary profit right here isn’t essentially real-world efficiency. Moderately, the upside of this improve is the addition of some particular options, particularly hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec help.

This isn’t new, however this chip helps Apple Intelligence, the much-ballyhooed suite of generative AI options Apple lately launched. At this level there aren’t many units left in Apple’s lineup that don’t help Apple Intelligence (it’s principally simply the most affordable, entry-level iPad that does not have it) and that’s excellent news for Apple, because it helps the corporate simplify its advertising and marketing messaging across the options.