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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, do FaceTime calls, play Apple Arcade games, or try your hand at drawing in Adobe Illustrator.
You’ll never feel the M4 iPad Air slow down in any of those tasks, and there’s still plenty of headroom for more. The 12 GB of unified memory (up from 8 GB in the previous generation) that comes standard gives even more assurance that you won’t be bottlenecked. If you intend to use the iPad Air as your main device, whether that’s for school or work, there’s plenty of performance here to last many years. That’s especially true now with the windowing and cursor updates in iPadOS 18, which make 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 had just the game in mind to try on it: Oceanhorn 3, one of the most graphically intense Apple Arcade titles to come out recently. Unlike many mobile games, it offers some different preset graphics settings to change between, which is helpful for trying to test the limits of the performance. In the Balanced mode, which sets the render scaling to 60 percent, the frame rate felt nice and smooth. At 80 percent scaling, though, the frame rate dropped, and it felt choppy. For reference, the M4 in the 13-inch MacBook Air performs stronger in some gaming benchmarks, up to 13 percent in 3DMark Steel Nomad Light, for example.
GPU performance isn’t only about gaming, though, as it also speeds up everything from video rendering and 3D modeling to on-device AI processing. If you’re coming from an M1 or M2 iPad Air, you’ll feel the difference. Then again, are people using the iPad Air for such tasks? Those don’t sound like things you casually do on a tablet on the go. But hey, you can do whatever you want with your iPad, and the M4 iPad Air just happens to allow you to do quite a lot. My guess, though, is that most people will be hard-pressed to fully utilize the capabilities of the M4—again, outside of playing a game.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
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