Apple’s Time Flies event has concluded, and the company launched four new hardware products today. We got the new Apple Watch Series 6, Apple Watch SE, the new 8th-gen iPad, and the company also launched the new iPad Air.
As hinted by rumours and leaks, the new iPad Air comes with an iPad Pro-like all screen design, complete with flat sides. The tablet also comes with a 10.9-inch retina display with 2360×1640 pixel resolution. It’s a true tone display, along with support for P3 colour gamut, anti-reflective coating, and it’s fully laminated.
However, while the design looks like the iPad Pro, the new iPad Air doesn’t bring in Face ID to the mix. Instead, Apple has opted to use Touch ID on the new tablet, integrating the fingerprint scanner into the power button.
The new iPad Air also finally brings USB Type-C to the Air line-up. That means a larger bandwidth for data transfer, more accessories that you can connect to it, and just overall a better ecosystem for the iPad Air.
Under the hood is the new A14 Bionic chipset. This is the processor we will likely see in the upcoming iPhone 12 series as well, by the way, but the iPad Air has become the first device to bring its power. The new chipset is built on a 5nm process, and has 11.8 billion transistors — a 40% increase over the A13 bionic. The SoC has a 6-core CPU with 4 high performance and 2 high efficiency cores, and a 4-core GPU. Apple claims that with the A14 Bionic, the new iPad Air offers 40% faster CPU performance and 30% faster GPU performance as compared to the previous generation iPad Air.
Moreover, there’s a 16-core neural engine, which can perform 11 trillion operations per second, resulting in 2x faster machine learning performance on the processor.
In terms of optics, the iPad Air brings a single 7MP front camera with an f/2.2 aperture and the ability to shoot 1080p 60FPS videos. On the rear, you get a 12MP camera with an f/1.8 aperture. This can shoot 4K videos at 60FPS and slow-motion videos at up to 240FPS.
Apart from all that, the new iPad Air supports the 2nd-gen Apple Pencil, complete with its wireless charging capabilities. Similar to how it is on the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil magnetically attaches to the iPad Air for charging and storage. You also get support for Apple’s new (and expensive) Magic Keyboard that was announced with the new iPad Pro.
The new iPad Air is priced starting at $599 and will be available next month.
