Apple iPad Air (M4) Review: The Ultimate iPad

In terms of staying true to the intent of what the iPad has always been, the iPad Air reigns supreme. Even the M4 in the iPad Air is a bit overkill for what the vast majority of people will use an iPad for. You don’t need a chip that powerful to browse the web, make FaceTime calls, play Apple Arcade games, or try your hand at drawing in Adobe Illustrator.

You’ll never feel like the M4 iPad Air is slowing down in any of those tasks, and there’s still plenty of headroom for more. The 12 GB of unified memory (versus 8 GB in the previous generation) that comes as standard gives even more assurance that you won’t get a bottleneck. If you plan to use the iPad Air as your main device, whether it’s for school or work, there’s plenty of performance here for the past many years. This is especially true now with the window and cursor updates iPadOS 18which makes it feel more like a Mac than ever.

If there’s a noticeable difference with the M4 over the M3, it’s definitely on the GPU front. I just had the game in mind to try it out: Ocean horn 3one of the most graphically intense Apple Arcade titles to come out recently. Unlike many mobile games, it offers a few different preset graphics settings to toggle between, which is useful for trying to test the limits of performance. In Balanced mode, which sets the rendering scale to 60 percent, the frame rate felt nice and smooth. However, at 80 percent scale, the frame rate dropped, and it felt choppy. For reference, the M4 in the 13-inch MacBook Air performs stronger in some gaming benchmarks, for example up to 13 percent in 3DMark Steel Nomad Light.

However, GPU performance isn’t just about gaming, as it also accelerates everything from video rendering and 3D modeling to AI processing on the device. If you’re coming from an M1 or M2 iPad Air, you’ll feel the difference. Do people then use the iPad Air again for such tasks? It doesn’t sound like things you casually do on a tablet. But hey, you can do whatever you want with your iPad, and the M4 iPad Air lets you do quite a lot. However, my guess is that most people will be hard-pressed to fully utilize the capabilities of the M4—again, outside of playing a game.

Photo: Luke Larsen