New iPad Air Review: Performance and Ecology, I Want It All

Tencent Digital | Wu Bin

When Apple updated the iPad mini last year, the update of the iPad Air also made sense. The question is whether Apple will "arm" it with A15 or M1. At last week's press conference, Apple gave the answer - M1.

The iPad Air has always been somewhere between the iPad Pro and the iPad mini, and it has both a larger screen and a relatively low price, which is attractive enough for some consumer users. Especially in the two years of the epidemic, the iPad has become the choice of many young users.

Now the iPad Air appears in front of users with a new attitude, and the processor is updated, allowing users who were hesitant in the face of the iPad Pro price to have new options. And this time, the iPad Air also brings Universal Control.

At this spring's new product launch, Apple's two products focused on updating, the iPhone SE and iPad Air, both adopted the same product strategy, that is, to retain the design of the previous generation and achieve performance improvements by updating the core hardware.

This means that when you get the all-new iPad AIr, you basically don't feel the difference in design from the previous generation, except, of course, for the color. This year, Apple has prepared four special colors for the iPad Air that are completely different from the previous generation, and if the overall color of the previous generation will be brighter, then this year's iPad Air has chosen four relatively dark colors. If you count the two brand new green versions of the iPhone 13 series, this spring, Apple seems to be favoring deeper colors.

The screen is still the familiar 10.9-inch LCD material Liquid Retina display, which supports P3 wide color gamut display, has a resolution of 2360 x 1640 pixels and a typical brightness value of up to 500 nits. The color display of this screen is quite good, which ensures that when using the iPad Air as a productivity tool, you can see better color performance on the screen.

But in order to distinguish the new iPad Air from the 11-inch iPad Pro released last year, Apple still only makes the ProMotion adaptive refresh rate the exclusive technology of the Pro series, which means that on the new iPad Air, you can still only see a 60Hz fixed refresh rate screen.

The 10.9-inch screen is basically the limit of my one-handed grip, fortunately, the new iPad Air maintains a good self-weight, the bare metal 461 grams of weight makes me more willing to carry it with me, with the second generation of Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard, so that it can be my handwriting book and computer at any time.

Although the iPad mini has more advantages in terms of self-weight, the screen size limits it to appear in more use cases, I prefer to use the mini to read e-books, and more work scene tasks, iPad AIr will be more suitable than it.

Many people think that iPad Air is confusing because of the update of the M1 processor, but from the current experience, iPad Air actually undertakes a lot of consumer market demand for large screens, such as watching videos, online lessons, graffiti or light office scenarios.

The fuselage is still only equipped with a power-integrated Touch ID, which is also a big difference between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. But to be honest, I prefer the design of Touch ID on the iPad, when using the iPad Pro before, the front Face ID often failed to unlock because my left hand obscured the camera when I held it with both hands, but the power Touch ID on the iPad mini did not have such a problem.

When the iPad OS was upgraded to 15.4, an interesting thing happened.

With the upcoming release of the iPad Air, iOS and iPad OS have completed the 15.4 version upgrade, and the Universal Control "Universal Control" function announced by Apple at WWDC last year has finally landed.

After Apple officially pushed the iPad OS 15.4 and macOS 12 Monterey 12.3 system on March 15, "Universal Control" can be enabled. This is a feature that enables the flow of information between mac and iPad, and you can control up to three Mac/iPad devices with one mouse, which is indispensable for Mac.

Universal control can be done wirelessly or wired, which is definitely my preferred connection method for me who is used to using AirDrop. Once turned on, the mouse and keyboard can be extended to the iPad Air, using a set of input devices to control both the MacBook and iPad AIr mouse to control both screens.

In the system interface, you can drag the screen of the iPad Air to appear on the left, right or bottom side of the MacBook Pro, and they correspond to the direction in which direction your mouse will slide into the screen of the iPad Air.

Unlike Apple's 2019 "Companion" function logic that apple brought on macOS Catalina, the logic of "Universal Control" is to extend the Mac's mouse keyboard to iPad Air, which means that even without a mouse and magic control keyboard, you can achieve efficient input operations.

In addition, through the "universal control" can also achieve content between the Mac and iPad to transfer, last year Apple demonstrated this feature at WWDC, you can drag layers from Procreate to iPad, or drag text between the computer and iPad and so on.

For me, it's like a new real-time sync feature added to iCloud. Apple is one of the best manufacturers in the world to achieve multi-hardware systems and information circulation, and the emergence of iCloud has greatly solved the problem of information synchronization, which is one of the reasons why U disks have gradually disappeared in the daily lives of many people.

But iCloud also has some problems, it needs to synchronize and share content through the network, and it needs to wait in the process of information flow. The emergence of "universal control" solves this problem to a certain extent, I can quickly drag the content on the Mac to the iPad Air, the process is real-time. From the perspective of a period of use, "universal control" can indeed improve my work efficiency to a certain extent.

This also means that with the blessing of new features, my MacBook and iPad Air can better coordinate with each other, I can expand the boundaries of the screen through the accompanying function, realize the flow of information and the sharing of keys and mice through universal control, and realize data backup through iCloud.

The software ecology determines the height of hardware products, which is vividly displayed in Apple.

The blessing of M1, so that this year's iPad Air in the performance of the big brother iPad Pro, benchmark results, iPad AIr and iPad Pro without any difference, with 8GB of running memory, which ensures that you can do any work it can achieve on the iPad Air, and M1 performance can also ensure that this iPad Air will not be eliminated in the next few years because of core hardware performance problems.

In the storage space part, Apple once again sacrificed a precise knife technique. 64GB or 256GB, yes, iPad Air only has two storage capacity options, in the case of the next "Original God" can occupy 15GB of storage space, so that 64GB of storage capacity for most users is definitely stretched, but Apple does not provide 128GB options, so most users may have to increase the price to buy the 256GB version.

The iPad Air processor runs

iPad Air overall performance score

The battery part has not improved in hardware, but the previous generation of iPad Air performed well in terms of battery life, and the new iPad AIr showed the same level. In the few days of using it, the iPad Air will basically be used as the second screen of my MacBook Pro, I just use it in a meeting or after work, basically in the case of a full charge, the iPad Air can last for about 2 days.

Regarding the difference between iPad Air and iPad Pro, to sum up: iPad Air does not have Face ID, ProMotion high refresh rate, mini-LED screen, lidar on the back and four speaker system, plus the overall storage capacity is relatively single, up to 256GB, which makes this product and the higher positioning iPad Pro open the gap, but also let the iPad Air positioned in a price range it should be.

In the past few days, the iPad Air has replaced my iPad Pro as the tablet device I use the most on a daily basis, compared to the latter, the iPad Air is lighter and the size of the screen is large enough that it is a necessary factor for me to enjoy using it, especially in office scenarios.

When Apple launched the iPad Pro last year, they put a high-performance desktop processor like the M1 on mobile devices for the first time, which made many users holding the previous generation of iPad Air hungry, and a year later, iPad Air users can also enjoy such benefits.

The addition of "Universal Control" has completely improved the productivity of the iPad Air, and of course, there are tablet products such as the iPad Pro that apple advertises as productivity. If products such as the iPad AIr and MacBook Pro were relatively separate in the work scene before, then after the technical maturity of "Accompanying" and the long-lost landing of "universal control", iPad Air has truly become the second screen of your desktop office.

I personally think that the iPad Air after upgrading the M1 chip is a very cost-effective existence, relative to the above Pro, it is pulled in performance, compared to the iPad mini below, it has an absolute advantage in screen size, and the iPad Air also has a relatively acceptable price for most people.

Of course, I recommend the 256GB version, after all, the vast majority of people who buy it will not be renewed every year, so the larger memory capacity can leave more room for use in the next few years.