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, nevertheless it’s value taking a short look regardless.
In virtually each method, that is equivalent to the earlier era. There are solely two variations to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the marginally quicker M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral.
In order for you extra particulars about this pill, consult with our M2 iPad Air assessment from final yr. The whole lot we mentioned 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 aspect, 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 gadgets 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 large positive aspects, nevertheless it’s a delicate step up over the M2 in final yr’s iPad Air.
That will probably be a noticeable enhance primarily for a handful of notably demanding 3D video games (the likes of Murderer’s Creed Mirage, Resident Evil Village, Infinity Nikki, and Genshin Influence) and a few heavy-duty purposes just a few folks use, like CAD or video modifying applications.
A lot of the iPad Air’s target market 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, specifically 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 not too long ago launched. At this level there aren’t many gadgets 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 messaging across the options.
