The iPad making an irresistible case to be number one
It isn’t the most expensive iPad, but the new iPad Air is quite the proposition.
Rewind 12 months and the answer to the perennial ‘Which iPad is best’ question was pretty obvious. The iPad Pro lineup was head and shoulders above the competition, and its March 2020 evolution did nothing to change our minds. It’s a stunning machine, as you’ll discover on the next spread.
By the end of 2020, the competition had very much heated up. The introduction of the fourth-generation iPad Air in September 2020 really caused eyes to roll. Featuring many of the incredible benefits you get with iPad Pro for significantly less money, the iPad Air is so good it’s dangerously close to cannibalising its big sibling.
Available in five colour finishes, this year’s iPad Air features an all-screen design with a larger 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display, camera and audio upgrades, a new integrated Touch ID sensor in the top button, and was the first Apple product released with the powerful A14 Bionic for a massive boost in performance. These improvements naturally make this the most powerful and capable iPad Air ever made.
That new all-screen design – which adds around 0.4 inches to its real estate compared to last year’s model, yet keeps the overall same size shell – offers a stunning visual
experience, with 3.8 million pixels and advanced technologies, including full lamination, P3 wide colour support, True Tone and an anti-reflective coating. The all-screen, edge-to-edge design means there is no room for a traditional Home button. Instead, a Touch ID sensor, the next-gen version obviously, has been built into the tablet’s top button, offering the same fast and secure way to unlock your device that you’ve become accustomed to. In turn you can log into apps and use Apple Pay via the new sensor.
It goes without saying that the fourthgen iPad Air is compatible with accessories like the Magic Keyboard, Smart Keyboard Folio and Smart Folio covers. Apple Pencil attaches magnetically to the side of the tablet for super easy pairing, charging and storing.
Perhaps most stark is Apple’s decision to kit the new iPad Air out with Apple’s selfproclaimed “most advanced chip”, the A14 Bionic. As you can guess, the new chip makes light work of even the most processorintensive tasks like 4K video editing or top-end gaming. Apple estimated that it made the new iPad Air 40 percent quicker, but emerging benchmark tests show that to be a conservative figure.
Perhaps even more important is the new Neural Engine, which makes day-to-day use smoother and more efficient. Make no bones about it, this iPad Air is super quick. We don’t rank it as quick as the iPad Pro, but until the Pro range gets updated again, the difference between the two will be barely noticeable.
The iPad Air now features the same 12MP rear camera used in the iPad Pro models, which means the same higher-res photos and 4K video. The new design features stereo speakers in landscape mode, meaning an improved stereo sound experience.
2020’s iPad Air is the first to feature a USB-C port – cue ten times faster data transfer between cameras, hard drives and external monitors. To complete the full house of improvements, iPad Air makes the most of the Wi-Fi 6 standard and promises 60 per cent faster LTE connectivity.
Where the iPad Pro does still have the upper hand is in the storage options. iPad Air offers just 64GB and 256GB. iPad Pro’s entry-level option is an impressive 128GB and goes as far as 1TB. If internal storage is high on your checklist, you might need to look beyond the Air.
That said, it’s near impossible to ignore the improvements Apple have sprinkled the fourth-gen iPad Air with. And, at roughly $400 cheaper than the iPad Pro 11-inch, the iPad Air has made a compelling case to be your next iPad.