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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1464866
Apple’s New iPad Air Is Finally Here with M1 Power and 5G at an Affordable Price By Jesse Hollington Although Apple’s Peek Performance event turned out to have a few surprises in store, the next generation of Apple’s mid-range iPad Air arrived almost exactly as we’d expected. This even included an eleventh-hour rumour yesterday that Apple would jump past the 6-core A15 chip added to the iPad mini 6 last fall and go straight into the same M1 territory occupied by the iPad Pro. Apple’s Engineering Program Manager for iPad, Angellina Kyazike, took to the stage to show off the new iPad Air, which retains the same thin and light design as its predecessor while packing in an unprecedented level of performance. According to Kyazike, the new iPad Air will pack in the same M1 chip as the iPad Pro in every way, including an 8-core GPU for amazing graphics performance that’s up to twice as fast as the prior iPad Air, and overall performance that 60% faster than its predecessor. The M1 chip allows the iPad Air to once again pull ahead of its smaller sibling, the iPad mini 6, and it does so by a pretty big leap. While many had expected the iPad Air 5 to simply match the iPad mini 6 by using the same A15 chip — after all, the iPad Air 4 went with the A14 — the move to the M1 takes it well beyond. For one thing, the M1 has 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores, while the A15 only packs in a six-core GPU and a five-core GPU. Kyazike didn’t make any comparisons to the iPad mini 6, but did note that the M1 also means that the iPad Air 5 is now twice as fast as the best-selling Windows laptop in its price range — a device that’s three times thicker and four times heavier. The move to the M1 also means that users of Apple’s more affordable tablet can get the same performance in demanding apps that was previously the exclusive domain of the iPad Pro. For instance, Kyazike showed how the 16-core Neural Engine allows Adobe