ZDNET's key takeaways The 2025 iPad Air is available in an 11-inch model starting at $600 and a 13-inch model starting at $800.
The latest iPad Air features Apple Intelligence, an M3 processor, and some of the best performance I've seen on an iPad to date.
But the iPad Air gets expensive quickly, with the 13-inch model selling for as much as $1,300. $772.29 at Amazon $699 at Best Buy more buying choices
At Walmart, the 11-inch M4 iPad Air is on sale for $479 starting. The 13-inch M3 iPad Air is also on sale for $679.
I've grown rather attached to my work MacBook Pro. I use it every day, take it with me when I need to work on the go, and rely on its outstanding battery life to stay as far away from outlets as possible. I've tried using an iPad instead of the MacBook Pro before, but have yet to find one that strikes the right balance of portability, value, and performance -- until the M3 iPad Air showed up at my door.
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The latest iPad Air is Apple's most capable tablet after the iPad Pro. It features the M3 Silicon chip, which is leaps and bounds ahead of my M1 MacBook Pro in performance, speed, and power, and supports Apple Intelligence. At this point, here's how the Apple iPad lineup stands in performance, from weakest to strongest: iPad 11th Gen, iPad Mini 7, iPad Air, and iPad Pro. So the question is, who should buy the Air?
Admittedly, there are no significant differences between the 2024 iPad Air and the 2025 model, as was made evident in my testing. This year's iPad Air is an iterative upgrade that takes the device from the M2 processor to the M3, with no new display capabilities or camera features. That's not a bad thing, per se.
Having tested last year's model, I focused on how the new iPad Air and the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air could perform together in a work setting.
Geekbench 6 scores Single-Core CPU Benchmark Multi-Core CPU Benchmark GPU benchmark iPad Air (M3) 3,098 11,689 44,406 iPad Air (M2) 2,622 10,007 41,771
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