{"id":136809,"date":"2025-03-16T06:57:03","date_gmt":"2025-03-16T06:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/apple-2\/2025-ipad-air-hands-on-why-mess-with-a-good-thing\/"},"modified":"2025-03-16T06:57:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T06:57:03","slug":"2025-ipad-air-hands-on-why-mess-with-a-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=136809","title":{"rendered":"2025 iPad Air hands-on: Why mess with a good thing?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There\u2019s not much new in Apple\u2019s latest refresh of the iPad Air, so there\u2019s not much to say about it, but it\u2019s worth taking a brief look regardless.<\/p>\n

In almost every way, this is identical to the previous generation. There are only two differences to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the slightly faster M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral.<\/p>\n

If you want more details about this tablet, refer to our M2 iPad Air review<\/a> from last year. Everything we said then applies now.<\/p>\n

From M2 to M3<\/h2>\n

The M3 chip has an 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores. On the GPU side, there are nine cores. There\u2019s also a 16-core Neural Engine, which is what Apple calls its NPU.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen the M3 in other devices before, and it performs comparably here in the iPad Air in Geekbench benchmarks. Those coming from the M1 or older A-series chips will see some big gains, but it\u2019s a subtle step up over the M2 in last year\u2019s iPad Air.<\/p>\n

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That will be a noticeable boost primarily for a handful of particularly demanding 3D games (the likes of Assassin\u2019s Creed Mirage,<\/em> Resident Evil Village<\/em>, Infinity Nikki<\/em>, and Genshin Impact<\/em>) and some heavy-duty applications only a few people use, like CAD or video editing programs.<\/p>\n

Most of the iPad Air\u2019s target audience would never know the difference, though, and the main benefit here isn\u2019t necessarily real-world performance. Rather, the upside of this upgrade is the addition of a few specific features, namely hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated AV1 video codec support.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t new, but this chip supports Apple Intelligence, the much-ballyhooed suite of generative AI features Apple recently introduced. At this point there aren\u2019t many devices left in Apple\u2019s lineup that don\u2019t support Apple Intelligence (it\u2019s basically just the cheapest, entry-level iPad that doesn’t have it) and that\u2019s good news for Apple, as it helps the company simplify its marketing messaging around the features.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s not much new in Apple\u2019s latest refresh of the iPad Air, so there\u2019s not much to say about it, but it\u2019s worth taking a brief look regardless. In almost every way, this is identical to the previous generation. 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