Apple Just Announced the M4 iPad Air

Apple is gearing up for a series of product announcements on Wednesday. So, naturally, the company revealed two of these products on Monday. There’s the iPhone 17e, Apple’s latest “affordable” iPhone, which largely just updates the A19’s chip. Along the same lines, the company is updating its iPad Air line with the M4 chip. If you’re hoping for more major iPad Air upgrades, keep waiting.

The iPad Air is the same, just now with M4

If you place the iPad Air M4 side by side with the iPad Air M3, you risk mixing the two. That’s because Apple has barely changed anything about the overall design and appearance of these tablets. The 11-inch M4 Air looks similar to the 11-inch M3 Air, as do the two 13-inch variants.

The only new thing about the M4 Air is, well, the M4. It’s not Apple’s newest chip, that would be the M5, but the M4 is a generation newer than the M3, so you should expect performance gains between the two. The M4 in the Air chip comes with an eight-core processor with three performance cores and five efficiency cores, a nine-core GPU, 120 GB/s memory bandwidth, and 12 GB of RAM. That’s one less performance core than the M3 Air, but one more efficiency heart. What will likely be more dramatic is the extra 4GB of RAM, as the M3 Air only comes with 8GB. You should be able to run more tasks at once on the new Air without iPadOS needing to refresh an app or page.

We won’t know exactly how these changes will affect performance until testers get their hands on the M4 iPad Airs. However, Apple claims that the new iPad is up to 30% faster than the previous generation and up to 2.3 times faster than the M1 iPad Air. (Apple tends to compare its latest products to those from several generations past, as the difference is often more subtle from one generation to the next). To me, that means that this is definitely not an iPad that M3 Air users should consider upgrading to, but if it’s probably a good option for anyone with an older Air, or an older iPad, to upgrade to.

With this M4 chip, Apple adds the N1 chip and the C1X modem to the iPad Air. The N1 chip comes with all iPad Air M4s and supports standards like Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, a smart home standard. If you buy the cellular iPad Air, you’ll get the C1X, Apple’s internal modem that it says is 30% more efficient than the iPad Air M3’s modem.

Aside from these points, this is the same iPad Air as the M3 model. It comes in an 11- or 13-inch option, with 12 MP rear and front cameras; USB-C connectivity with Touch ID; the same battery life (Apple announces 10 hours of video playback); and both still start with 128GB of storage. And, notably, it still omits a high-refresh 120Hz display for the usual 60Hz. It’s disappointing.

How to buy the iPad Air M4

You can pre-order an iPad Air M4 on March 4, starting at $599 (the same starting price as Apple’s recently announced iPhone 17e) for the 11-inch 128GB model. The 13-inch starts at $799 for the 128GB model. Adding cellular adds $150 to the price. Apple says the iPad Air M4 will officially launch on Wednesday, March 11, the same day as the iPhone 17e, as well as Samsung’s Galaxy S26 series.