AppleがM4チップ搭載の新型iPad Airを発表

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more

memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same

starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks

like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a

faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more

unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad

Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to

2.3× faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features

the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X,

delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support

for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative

anywhere. [...]

With the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model

and $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible

value. And for education, the 11-inch iPad Air starts at $549, and

the 13-inch model starts at $749. Customers can pre-order iPad Air

starting Wednesday, March 4, with availability beginning

Wednesday, March 11.

So much for my theory that Apple would separate its announcements this week with separate days for each product family (e.g. iPhone 17e on Monday, iPads on Tuesday, MacBooks on Wednesday.) Maybe an update to the no-adjective iPad isn’t coming this week?

Aside from the M3 to M4 speed bump, there are very few differences between this generation iPad Air and the last. Same colors even (space gray, blue, purple, and starlight). Here’s a link to Apple’s iPad Compare page, preset to show the current M5 iPad Pro, new M4 iPad Air, and old M3 iPad Air side-by-side.

One interesting tech spec: the new M4 iPad Air models come with 12 GB of RAM, up from 8 GB in last year’s M3 models. With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.

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