iPad Air M3

 Review of Apple iPad Air M3 : One of the best tablets 

Apple’s latest thin and light tablet is the definition of an iterative upgrade, taking last year’s model and simply swapping in slightly faster guts. It’s an update that makes one of the best tablets around the world. New iPad has laptop-level power, reliable battery life, great video call camera and a choice of screen sizes. Apple’s iPad Air continues to be the premium tablet to beat, with the latest version featuring a chip upgrade to keep it ahead of the pack. The new iPad Air M3 costs from £599 (€699/$599), the same as its predecessor, and comes in two sizes with either an 11in or 13in screen. It sits between the base-model £329 iPad A16 and the £999 iPad Pro M4, splitting the difference in price and features.  iPad Air is perfect weight, solid battery life and performance so good it practically makes the iPad Pro obsolete, but also everything we wish could be a bit better. Nothing has changed on the outside of the tablet. The M3 model is a straight replacement for the M2 model, featuring the same crisp screen, sleek aluminium design and Touch ID fingerprint scanner in the power button.

The latest iPad Air improves on one of our favourite tablets with a faster M3 processor which brings it even closer in speed to the iPad Pro. The new iPad Air is functionally identical to the 2024 model. Apple’s modern iPad Air design lives up to its namesake, with a feathery aluminium frame which was much more comfortable to carry than the MacBook Pro. Its quartet of colour options aren’t the most exciting and continues to be a sleek, understated tablet that won’t raise any eyebrows when you’re using it in the wild. The Centre Stage webcam at the top of the screen makes video calls a breeze by automatically panning and scanning to keep you and your family in frame. Stereo speakers make watching TV and films great, while support for the £129 Apple Pencil Pro makes doodling or taking notes a joy. The slender aluminium frame contains the stereo speakers, a Touch ID sensor and volume buttons. You once again have a choice of 11-inch and 13-inch models, the latter of which was introduced last year and is an especially nice option for multitasking and movie-binging. 

The iPad takes about two hours to charge using a 30W or greater power adaptor, which is not included. The big change for the new Air is an upgrade to the Apple M3 chip, which was first seen in late 2023 in the MacBook Pro and was successfully used in the MacBook Air until March when it was replaced with the M4 chip. The iPad Air’s Liquid Retina display made a perfectly fine canvas for watching Daredevil: Born Again and catching up on graphic novel backlog. A little extra brightness wouldn’t hurt either. While the M3 isn’t Apple’s latest chip, it is still far more powerful than most will ever need in a tablet and much faster than the competition. It is about 10-20% quicker than the outgoing M2 model in tests and will make short work of games and even pro-level apps such as Affinity Photo, Procreate or Adobe Lightroom. The tablet’s 12-megapixel webcam is reliable, and comes with Apple’s Centre Stage feature which can centre you in frame even as you move. Combined with a reliable battery life of nine to 10 hours, it can easily be used as a laptop replacement when equipped with accessories such as the new version of Apple’s excellent Magic Keyboard case, although that comes at great cost at £269. Cheaper third-party options from Logitech and others are available for all.

The one thing that is new for the iPad Air this year is the Apple M3 chip packed inside, which brings Apple’s midrange tablet that much closer to the iPad Pro on the “basically a computer” scale. The fact that we could smoothly bounce between Slack, Outlook, Safari and Google Docs all while on a Zoom call isn’t new, but being able to work this seamlessly on a tablet still feels novel. And while the speed bump from the M2 iPad Air to the new M3 version is negligible when it comes to everyday real world use, tests reveal just how small the gap between the iPad Air and iPad Pro is getting. The iPad Air runs iPadOS 18.4, which includes a collection of multitasking tools and can be plugged into an external monitor such as a laptop via the USB-C port. But the M3 chip also enables various Apple Intelligence features, which are not available on the standard iPad A16. These include several AI image editing and generation tools, writing and proofreading tools, ChatGPT integration into Siri and other bits.

Apple’s latest slim slate posted the third-highest score we’ve ever gotten on the Geekbench 6 general performance test, falling only to the Microsoft Surface Pro 2024 and the latest M4-powered iPad Pro. While the iPad Pro has some key advantages we’ll talk about soon, the fact that Apple’s $599 tablet fell behind its $999 tablet by just 20% or so on our tests drives home just how little you’re giving up when it comes to everyday speed. The recycled aluminium body looks and feels great. Apple says the battery should last in excess of 1,000 full charge cycles with at least 80% of its original capacity, and can be replaced. The tablet contains at least 30% recycled content, including aluminium, cobalt, copper, glass, gold, lithium, plastic, rare earth elements and tin. Apple breaks down the tablet’s environmental impact in its report and offers trade-in and free recycling schemes, including for non-Apple products. The iPad Air continues to be a great little gaming machine. Apple’s tablets aren’t going to replace your PS5, Xbox or PC anytime soon, but the fact that can fire up a modern blockbuster like Resident Evil 4 anywhere you want and play it at a pretty respectable fidelity deserves some praise.

We can’t talk about a current Apple product without talking about Apple Intelligence. Same goes for more practical applications, like when the Notes app recognized that we doodled out a math problem and immediately offered a solution. The 11in iPad Air M3 costs from £599 (€699/$599) and the 13in iPad Air M3 costs from £799 (€949/$799). The vast majority of Apple Intelligence tools, which also include the ability to erase photobombers from your photos, generate your own emojis and turn Apple Pencil sketches into detailed images. You also don’t need this specific iPad Air to use them; any iPad Air or Pro with an M1 or newer supports AI, as does the latest iPad Mini. But if you are excited about this kind of thing, know that the M3 iPad Air handles it as well as any Apple device. You can comfortably bring the iPad Air M3 out for a day at the office or your favourite place without having to worry about plugging in. When playing a looped 4K video during battery test, the latest iPad Air survived for a solid 10 hours and 10 minutes, almost exactly on par with Apple’s own 10-hour estimate. It also fared well in real world use, allowing to get through a workday’s worth of writing, emailing, video conferencing and web browsing while still having more than 20% in the tank the next morning. It has more than enough daily endurance for the kinds of things you’re probably buying an iPad Air for. The iPad Air M3 is a great premium tablet that makes for an excellent upgrade over the base model Apple tablet.

Launching alongside the iPad Air is a slightly upgraded Magic Keyboard which finally gives you a proper row of function keys for quickly adjusting things like brightness, volume and media playback with a quick tap. The trackpad has also gotten about 10% larger, which is ideal for smoothly scrolling around. It’s yet another tweak that brings the iPad Air closer to parity with its pricier Pro counterpart, and something solid use out of while using the new iPad as main computer for a few days. It is a highly capable machine with laptop-level power, long battery life, a quality screen and plenty of accessories to turn it into a drawing tablet, computer replacement or many other tools. The choice of sizes balances nicely between portability at the 11in and the big-screen utility of the 13in version. The good news is that you don’t need the newest iPad Air to take advantage of this perk; the improved Magic Keyboard will work just fine with previous generations. Likewise, if you’re upgrading from an older iPad Air, you’ll still be able to use the Magic Keyboard you may already have on the new M3 model. As usual, Apple’s keyboard doesn’t come cheap and there are plenty of good alternatives like the $200 Logitech Combo Touch. The Magic Keyboard continues to be one of the best iPad keyboards available, and it’s now gotten just that much better for folks looking to use their iPad in lieu of a laptop. But the M3 model isn’t an upgrade worth making over recent iPad Air versions, and if all you do is watch TV or films on it, the standard iPad A16 does the job for much less. Meanwhile, the top-end iPad Pro M4 beats the Air on all counts but costs an awful lot more.

iPad Air M3 is unquestionably one of the best iPads out right now. It’s nice and light, works with most of the apps you probably care about and is absurdly fast, to the point where a good chunk of power users drawn to the iPad Pro can save a few hundred bucks and just get this one instead. If your budget isn’t particularly tight and you’re upgrading after many years (or getting your very first iPad), you’ll be very happy with your purchase. So for those looking for a premium do-it-all tablet, the iPad Air M3 is hard to beat. choice of sizes, laptop-level M3 performance, solid battery life, quality screen, USB-C, long software support life, large range of apps and accessories, good speakers, landscape Centre Stage camera, recycled aluminium are all you can think off. Iterative products are a fact of life. But for folks who already have an iPad they’re content with, the M3 iPad Air can be a tough sell. The iPad Air is still an excellent choice for that middle-of-the-pack user who wants an iPad that can also sort of be a laptop and doesn’t want to shell $1,000 or more for a Pro. 

Specifications

RAM: 8GB

Camera: 12MP rear, 12MP centre stage

Dimensions: 247.6 x 178.5 x 6.1mm or 280.6 x 214.9 x 6.1mm

Processor: Apple M3 (9-core GPU)

Weight: 460g or 616g

Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB

Screen: 11in or 13in Liquid Retina display (264ppi)

Operating system: iPadOS 18.4

Connectivity: Wifi 6E (5G optional eSim-only), Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, Touch ID, Smart Connecter

M3 upgrade and solid battery life