Unlike the 8th-gen iPad which only received a few minor improvements under the hood with the A12 Bionic chip, Apple has given the latest iPad Air a complete facelift and rethink.
For starters, the home button is gone and the screen extends completely to the edges, offering a 10.9-inch surface area.
And after five days with it, we have to say that we really like the iPad Air, especially with its starting price of $ 599.99 for 64GB of storage, it's a great option for anyone looking to go beyond that. an entry-level iPad can do.
The 10.9-inch screen feels good and gives plenty of room for multitasking.
And for movie nights, this screen excels at color reproduction.
We also found that the A14 Bionic chip allows it to perform almost any task.
Sure, the iPad Air may seem like a mix of different features, but it also stands as mid-range.
There's no Face ID and no noticeable refresh rate with this display like you'd find on an iPad Pro. But some high-end features have leaked out and the iPad Air feels like the Pro option for the masses.
It's not light like air, but it's still very light
As the name suggests, the iPad Air is known for being ultra-portable.
It's very comfortable to hold with one hand even with its nearly 11-inch screen.
The iPad Air 2020 weighs just over a pound, making it lighter than a bottle of water.
And its thickness (6.1 millimeters) is similar to four credit cards stacked one on top of the other.
The Air's aluminum design really allows the respective colors (sky blue, green, silver, and space gray) to shine through as the light hitting the rear at different angles shows a brighter or darker hue.
The Smart Connector is on the back for easy pairing with accessories like the Smart Keyboard.
On one side there is a place where a second generation Apple Pencil can be magnetically attached.
Like the iPad Pro, this not only keeps the Apple Pencil in place, it will charge it wirelessly.
There is also no Lightning port on the iPad Air;
Apple has changed a USB-C port to replace it and we are very happy with the decision.
Our favorite part of the design is that Apple tucked a Touch ID sensor into the power button.
It is the first time that Apple has introduced a fingerprint sensor on the home button of an iPad.
In our tests, Touch ID was as fast in this new form as it was on a home button.
If anything, most of the time it felt about half a second faster.
Face ID is a lot easier, as you don't really need to do anything except look at the depth sensor on the top of the iPad, but it's also clear that Apple is reserving that technology for its flagship iPads.
We imagine that Face ID on the iPad Air would have increased the price.
Overall, though, we're happy with this Touch ID implementation, and it only took us a day to change our habits.
A screen closer to the bezel-less screen
Compared to previous generations of iPad Air, Apple is giving you a slightly larger screen: swap a 10.5-inch for a 10.9-inch.
The big difference to get that 0.4-inch increase?
Remove the start button and thin the bezels.
And while 0.4 inches is a relatively small increase, in combination with this revamped design and slimmer bezels, the iPad Air feels more expansive.
It can more comfortably fit two applications side by side.
The display is Liquid Retina, which is Apple's name for an LCD screen.
Essentially, it doesn't light up pixel by pixel like an OLED, instead it has a backlit panel that goes through filters to create an image.
Still, it creates a vivid and sharp image at 2360 X 1640 resolution offering 264 pixels per inch.
It also supports True Tone and, especially good for creatives, complies with the Wide Color P3 standard.
Apple tries to minimize these finger smudges on the screen with a fingerprint resistant oleophobic coating, which we certainly found manages to hide most fingerprints.
Although too oily fingers will still leave a mark and sometimes residue.
The screen also features an anti-reflective coating that helps block out smudgy views, especially under fluorescent lights or outside.
In our testing period, the text looked sharp and we didn't notice any pixelation around individual numbers or letters, a problem that often plagues some low-end displays and even LCDs.
Viewing emails and reading text on the iPad Air was easy on the eyes thanks to True Tone.
With streaming content, we sampled the Springsteen documentary Letter To You which hits Apple TV + on October 23.
They are partial studio sessions, panoramic shots of the outdoors and the E Street Band together, all in black and white.
The iPad Air reproduced the image with the appropriate color color through grays and blacks for a compelling experience.
Compared to viewing on an iPad Pro, it would be difficult to really notice a difference in image quality.
And although this does not have ProMotion (an adaptive refresh rate that goes up to 120Hz) we did not notice any milling or problems with production.
That same comment also extends to video games in Real Racing 3, War Robots along with watching superhero movies like Captain Marvel or Guardians of the Galaxy.
We'd also like to call out the stereo speakers that flank the left and right sides when the iPad Air is held horizontally.
They have good power and offer a fairly robust sound experience that is second only to the iPad Pro.
A14 Bionic is a very capable chip
The iPad lineup has a clear entry point with the 8th generation iPad and a high-end with the iPad Pro. With the A14 Bionic inside, the iPad Air truly establishes itself as the mid-range option, a next step up. on top of the 8th-gen iPad that is not up to par with the iPad Pro with the A12Z inside.
For example, you can run a series of photo edits in Photoshop or Pixelmator (leading editing apps) at three to four times the speed of the 8th generation iPad.
And by meeting that mark, the iPad Air is almost in line with the iPad Pro, thanks to Apple's latest Silicon processor inside.
The A14 Bionic is also being used in the iPhone 12 Mini, 12, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max.
It is the first 5 nanometer chip made by Apple.
Inside it contains a six-core CPU, a four-core GPU, and a neural engine that is made up of 16 cores.
It can be said that it is a powerful chip that is also quite efficient and now when to speed up or put intense tasks on a higher power core.
And thanks to this configuration, the iPad Air outperforms the previous generation device, the 8th generation iPad and the iPad Mini with almost any workflow or task.
From gaming to writing to communication, iPad Air just gets the job done faster.
In many cases, we found that it is almost on par with the iPad Pro in completing those tasks.
When we use it for a work day with Outlook, Mail, video calls, Slack, web browsing, and lots of typing, we don't experience any slowdown.
For example, with multitasking it was easy to run two applications side by side and a third, like messages, floating above.
Graphics- and processor-intensive games like War Robots, Real Racing 3, and Call of Duty: Mobile performed as expected.
There was no noticeable latency neither on the device nor over the internet.
The only qualm we experienced here was at full brightness and full volume, the power dropped by around 5% during the first game in Call of Duty.
It could have been that it was his first time playing, which could have attracted additional resources.
That turned out to be true again when using Shadow, a service that allows you to remotely use a high-powered PC for games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Grand Theft Auto V.
Rendering and exporting a 4K video in iMovie happened fairly quickly with no noticeable slowdowns.
It produced a result much faster than the 8th generation iPad by several minutes.
We also tested the iPad Air with Adobe Photoshop and Pixelmator in an effort to engage the Neural Engine for tasks and processes that use Machine Learning.
The iPad Air also works with the Magic Keyboard.
Specifically, the smallest model that was originally released for the 11-inch iPad Pro, it magnetically fits the iPad Air and adds the same function (with the same weight and thickness).
If you want a full computer-like experience with a trackpad, this is the best experience yet on the iPad Air.
The keyboard feels just as good as when we reviewed the Magic Keyboard a few months ago.
The connection between the Magic Keyboard and the iPad Air is still powered by the Smart Connector on the back.
It's extremely simple and doesn't require you to fumble through setup and manage multiple power cables.
You have a wall socket in the box
Unlike the iPhone 12 family, the box doesn't just include a USB-C to USB-C cable along with the iPad Air.
There's also a 20-watt USB-C wall socket and that's great news.
This is the same $ 19 brick that Apple recommends buying for fast charging on the iPhone 12. We're delighted that it comes in the iPad box and gives you the full package right out of the box.
And that brings us to the battery of the iPad Air and, honestly, it has been great in the last five days.
Enough power to spend a full day working and more.
Even when those days drag on with some videos, FaceTime calls, and games.
Apple promises around 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching a video.
We ran the iPad Air through CNN Underscored's battery test, playing a 4K video in a loop with brightness set to 50%, volume to 30%, and airplane mode enabled on the device.
We supervised the test with two cameras for redundancy.
The iPad Air lasted six hours and 45 minutes.
That's behind the 8th generation iPad, which lasted for nine hours and 45 minutes.
conclusion
The new iPad Air has a bold design that feels almost like the Pro, and the hardware inside isn't far behind, either.
With the A14 Bionic inside, we were able to easily perform work and play tasks.
For those productivity-focused tasks, pairing it with the Magic Keyboard gave us the ease of classic interfaces to work with, namely a keyboard and trackpad.
Works well with iPadOS 14.
At $ 599.99 with 64GB of internal storage, you get a pretty complete package with plenty of storage for apps and documents, too.
If you're a student, remote worker, or someone looking to upgrade from an entry-level tablet, the iPad Air is worth a look.
Note: The above prices reflect the price at the time of publication of the article.