If you combine all of Apple’s best tablet features together, you’ll get the new Apple iPad Air and the updated iPad lineup. The iPad air packs the all-new A12 Bionic chip and supports the Smart Keyboard, which is a first for non-Pro iPad. Starting from $499, it’s half the price of 12.9-inch iPad Pro and $170 more than the basic iPad.
The bright, colorful, crisp 10.5-inch screen it boasts fall in a sweet spot as well, allowing a fantastic canvas for gaming and multitasking activities. Coupled with long battery life, and you get the best mid-size tablet today.
Spec highlights:
- Apple A12 Bionic chip with Neural Engine
- 10.5-inch LCD Retina Display with True Tone and wide colors
- Support for Apple Pencil (1st gen) and Smart Keyboard
- 1-pound weight and slim, 6.1mm body
- 10-hour battery life
- Space grey, silver and gold color options
- 10+ hours battery life
iPad Air price and availability
You can get the iPad Air at $499 with 64GB of storage, which is adequate for most, especially if you use to store photos and files in an iCloud account. In any case, a 256GB storage option is available at $649.
Upgrading to cellular LTE connectivity will cost an extra $130, which is a perk people have been begging Apple to offer on their next MacBook Pro. This means the difference between simply relying on airport Wi-Fi, or lugging a hotspot everywhere, as not everyone has a cellular plan with mobile hotspot capabilities.
As said above, the new iPad Air can now support Apple’s $99 iPad Pencil (1st Gen) and the $159 Smart Keyboard cover.
Performance
The iPad Air’s A12 Bionic system-on-chip features the Neural Engine for machine learning as well as the M12 co-processor, which provides plenty of speed power-hungry apps and modern ones as Procreate and Pixelmator Photos that enable snappy creative experiences. This processor is also capable of handling more-traditional laptop-like use as well.
Design
The new iPad Air understandably a larger iPad, making it a much-larger iPad mini, which means that familiar with the aluminum unibody design (still available in silver, space grey and gold). The bezels are slimmer than the original 2012 iPad Air, but the similarities are still uncanny.
iPad Air sadly doesn’t ditch its Lightning port for the USB Type-C port seen in the iPad Pro, but the 3.5mm headphone jack is made available so that’s going for us. The Touch ID fingerprint sensor is still here, meaning the Face ID has yet to replace it.
Display
You will be giddy with the tablet’s fantastic image quality. Watching Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse for instance, you’ll clearly see the red-and-blue hues of young Miles Spider-Man costume pop off the screen as he talks with Peter B. Parker. If you get the chance to demo it on an Apple store, do it. You’ll be amazed at the technology behind the screen.
Smart Keyboard, Apple Pencil
The iPad Air supports the Apple Pencil and has a Smart Connector that’s used with Apple’s Smart Keyboard cover. The Apple Pencil works amazingly well with all the drawing and editing apps that come with the unit. The iPad’s Air Smart Keyboard offers a good typing experience. Despite the shallow keys, typing is very comfortable and fast.
Bottom Line
While the new Apple iPad Air doesn’t reinvent anything from the previous Apple tablets, it effectively provided a fantastic combination of Apple’s existing parts and pieces. The iPad Air’s awesome display, solid battery life, and quick performance place it in a league of its own. You can get your very own iPad air at Domayne including the other varieties of iPad as well as the accessories mentioned here.
What are your thoughts on the new iPad Air? Share it with us!
