iPad Air review 2026: the M4 and other chip bumps make a difference

The newest iPad Air is a chip bump iPad — maybe the chip-bump-iest iPad Air yet. Inside this new machine are, in fact, three upgraded chips compared to last year’s model: an M4 processor, a C1X cellular modem, and an N1 chip that brings the Air Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support. That is the entire list of upgrades on this year’s device.

Apple talks about the Air in a very straightforward way: it’s where Apple’s top-line tech goes after it’s retired from the iPad Pro, typically once Apple has a better version available and can produce the existing version with more scale and cost-efficiency. Does that make the iPad Air as much a product of Apple’s operations department as its design and product teams? Sure does! But at times, it has also led to the Air being Apple’s most compelling tablet for most people: Good tech at a good price.

In fact, right now, if you’re in the market for a new iPad, I’d probably tell you to buy an Air. (I recommend most people get the 11-inch one, but if you’re wielding a 13-inch tablet, know that I respect your game.) The base iPad is starting to look seriously underpowered and doesn’t support some of Apple’s best accessories; the Pro remains way more tablet for way more money than most people require. Yes, I wish the Air’s $599 price bought you 256GB of storage instead of 128GB, especially when Apple is doubling the base storage on so many of its devices. Yes, I’d love to have the Pro’s much smoother 120Hz OLED screen instead of this 60Hz LED display. Even the base iPhone 17 has a ProMotion display now! I still miss FaceID, too. But if you have to make tradeoffs to hit a price, those are reasonable ones to make.

Back to the chip bumps: In my tests, the M4 Air benchmarks about 20-25 percent faster than the M3 Air in CPU tasks, and 10-15 percent faster in GPU tasks. (It also benchmarks a hair above the M4 iPad Pro for CPU, and a hair below for GPU, despite having ostensibly the same chip. Weird.) That’s a decent performance bump over a 12-month old device, but as is often the case, you’ll almost never notice the difference. Even side by side, the two Airs launch apps the same, look the same playing high-end games — the only spot I’ve noticed the M4 Air to be consistently faster is in generating search results in Spotlight search.

That’s not the comparison that matters, though. Let’s say, conservatively, that you should be able to buy an iPad expecting it to work well for five years. (Realistically, I think the number is a year or two higher, but let’s just stick with five.) If you’re in the market for this year’s iPad Air, that means you may have bought the fourth-generation iPad Air from 2020 or the 10th-generation iPad from 2022. Both of those devices have an A14 Bionic chip. The M4 measures between about 80 percent and 250 percent faster than the A14 Bionic on CPU tasks, and more than three times better on GPU tasks.

Believe me: you will notice that upgrade. Every single thing about your new iPad, from tiny animations to high-end games, will feel smoother and better and faster than your previous device. Even if you don’t do any new stuff on this iPad, you’ll like this one better.

If you have last year’s M3 iPad Air, or the M2 model from 2024, you absolutely, positively do not need to upgrade. This is good news! Apple has not dreamed up some big new idea about iPads since you bought your device; it just keeps shipping slightly better iPads. But at this rate, by the time you do need a new device, all these bumps will have added up to something impressive.

As for the other chips, Apple’s C1X in particular seems to be something of a revelation. I have long been a passionate believer in cell-enabled iPads, because there’s something about that constant connectedness that makes the iPad instantly more useful as an on-the-go way todo email, reading, or web browsing, things the iPad is meant for. They also make great hotspots, thanks to their enormous batteries. In my testing so far, the M4 Air is consistently the fastest cell-enabled device in my possession, and in bad service areas sometimes delivers speeds multiple times faster than recent iPhones, Pixels, and even other iPads.

The other chip, the N1, I don’t notice as much. Like most people, I don’t have a Wi-Fi 7 setup in my house, and so the Air is about as fast on Wi-Fi as any other recent device. Bluetooth remains fine and finicky in equal measure, no matter the version number. And Thread… I don’t even really know what it’s there for. I’m not sure Apple does, either.

There are a lot of iPads these days, which Apple seems to launch at more or less random intervals. But the story is actually fairly straightforward: The Pro is the best iPad, and it’s not particularly close. (Not to throw a wrench into the proceedings here, but if you can find a good deal on an M4 iPad Pro now that the M5 model is out, you should jump on it.) The base iPad is the cheap one, but every day that goes by without a meaningful upgrade that device becomes a worse deal. The iPad Mini is for iPad Mini people — you know who you are.

And for everyone else, there’s the iPad Air. It’s not perfect, but it’s great, and the price is about right. My advice with iPads is always the same: Buy the best one you can afford, keep it as long as humanly possible, and then enjoy the spoils of all those chip bumps.