iPad Air M3 review: second verse, same as the first

iPad Air M3 Intro

So, let’s delve in and see if it’s a good tablet to buy! 

Table of Contents:

iPad Air M3 Specs

A gentle bump

Let’s start with an overview of the TABLET specs:

iPad Air M3 Design and Display

Nothing’s changed

Unlike the Pros, the iPad Air at least comes in a couple extra colors that add some panache. In the case of the iPad Air M3, you can pick from Blue, Purple, Starlight, and Space Gray. The colors are not super-vibrant, but add a tasteful hue to the chassis.

The design is fully “modern iPad” — no home button and the selfie camera is on the side frame. Meaning, when the tablet is in landscape orientation (laptop-like) the selfie camera ends up on top. On the back, there’s a single lens that protrudes a bit. Not a big square like on a Pro. Would’ve been better if we had a flush back here, even if the camera suffered for it. After all, we mostly use a tablet’s front camera anyway. But alas.

You will notice there are also the three connection dots on the back. iPad Airs have supported and shared the Magic Keyboard with the iPad Pros for a while now. But now that Apple is adding some more separation between the lines, we have a Magic Keyboard that’s strictly for the iPad Pros (the thin, metal one), then this Magic Keyboard for iPad Air which is the old rubber-ish design but with an added function keys row, and the base-tier iPad A16 still uses the Magic Keyboard folio, which doesn’t have a fancy floating stand but a flimsy kickstand instead.

What’s in the box? Uhhh, here, have a cable! (Image credit – PhoneArena)

The iPad Air M3 does support both the base Apple Pencil USB-C, but also the Apple Pencil Pro with its squeeze functionality and its magnets that make it stick to the tablet and charge wirelessly.

By all accounts, the iPad Air M3 is kind of sort of iPad Pro but a bit worse. How? Incoming:

The iPad Air M3 still uses the “old” IPS LCD panels. Not mini-LED, not OLED. But that, in itself, is not a huge issue. Apple’s LCD panels look lovely. Yeah, sure, you can “see” the backlight when using it in the dark, but that’s hardly a huge deal. What we do have a bit of an issue is the 60 Hz refresh rate it’s locked to. With an M3 chip now, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason an Air is locked to 60 Hz is simply because it’s not a Pro.

The screen is laminated, which means that Apple uses that fancy tech to fuse the touch digitizer and the screen glass together. This saves on some space and brings the image close to the outside layer. It’s something that you won’t notice if you’ve been using upper-class iPads (or Galaxy Tabs) for a while, but when you compare it to a base-level iPad A16, the latter’s screen looks “sunken-in”.

There’s also no Face ID on the iPad Air M3 — it uses Touch ID fingerprint scanning embedded in the power button, since there’s no home button. Touch ID is excellent — it’s fast and accurate. Though, it’s a bit awkward to use on a tablet and us spoiled Pro users do miss Face ID here. But it’s not a huge problem, if you don’t want to spend iPad Pro money, you won’t be missing Face ID too much.

iPad Air M3 Keyboard and Stylus

Ah, it’s Magic (Image credit – PhoneArena)

The very first Magic Keyboard was launched in 2020, with that generation of iPad Pros. When I tried that one 5 years ago… I remember it kind of made me angry. Why? Because it was and is a very good keyboard, and the touchpad works quite well on iPadOS. It also feels so good with the way it attaches and releases the iPad with magnets — just excellent. But why angry? Because it is an extremely expensive addition to the tablet purchase.

The new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air is that same design, with the rubbery feel to it, but it has an added function key row. It even adds a USB-C port for pass-through charging, so you can use the port on the tablet for something else, like an external drive. Great! And it costs $270 — that’s half the price of an iPad Air M3 11″ with 128 GB. Not… great.

If you are planning to buy one, know that the 11-inch size frame makes for a bit of a cramped feel to write on, but you can get used to it. The key travel time and feedback, the touchpad — they are excellent. The 13-inch model feels spacious and pretty much instantly like home.

Draw me like one of your Cupertino products (Image credit – PhoneArena)

Then, there’s the Apple Pencil. If you want to save some money and get a good stylus, the Apple Pencil USB-C will do the job fine. However, the Apple Pencil Pro adds a lot — it has a tap area to swap through brushes, and a squeeze function to open menus faster. It detects barrel rolls and has pressure sensitivity where the base Pencil does not. And it charges wirelessly, while the USB-C model needs to be plugged into the iPad awkwardly from time to time.

iPad Air M3 Performance & Benchmarks

It’s an M3, do we doubt its power?

As can be seen, it’s still outperformed by the M4 chip, but do we need that much power in an iPad. The overwhelming answer to that question is usually “no”. The M3 is literally a desktop- and laptop-class chip that can be found in MacBook Pros still out there in the wild. Expensive Pros, used by… well, professionals.

The iPad App Store does, indeed, offer pro apps like Logic for iPad and Final Cut Pro for iPad, and you will definitely get renders that are a few minutes faster than before. In fact, up until this year, the base-level iPad didn’t support Final Cut, but the new A16 model does.

So, we can definitely gawk and swoon over the M3’s performance, but it’s really hard to make a case for it being in the iPads in the first place.

GPU Performance

It’s also being outrun by the M4 in the graphics department. But make no mistake — the Apple M3 does offer hardware-accelerated ray tracing and will play the high fidelity games that are (slowly) coming to iPadOS. Like Warframe! Did you know Warframe was now on the iPad and iPhone? Requires a device with an A12 Bionic or above. And the M3… it’s way, way above!

The iPad Air comes with a base storage option of 128 GB. That’s mostly fine by 2025 standards — you can definitely work with that if you maintain a clean file system. However, if you are more into video editing, upgrading to at least 256 GB is recommended. All models come with 8 GB of RAM.

iPad Air M3 Software

We’ve talked about this at length. In fact, the entire tech blogsphere is still kind of sort of on the fence about the whole Apple Intelligence package. Most of these features are party tricks, some fail miserably (there’s a whole subreddit on notification summaries gone wrong), and there are some useful ones — mainly summarizing long webpages or the recording from the meeting.

Otherwise, it’s iPadOS, which is an inflated version of iOS in its own right. With iPadOS, you get the Stage Manager UI option, which is supposed to simulate a desktop-like experience on the iPads, you have slide-over and split-view for multi-tasking. None of these are super floaty or customizable and you will always feel like you are making a compromise when trying to use an iPad instead of a laptop.

But, in general, for “one app at a time” focused work, it’s smooth, pleasing, and fun to use.

You should expect 5 years of iPadOS updates with the iPad Air M3, at the very least. Could be more — Apple never directly discloses or commits to end-of-updates schedules, so we have to go by what history has taught us.

Four speaker grilles total, but half of them are just for show (Image credit – PhoneArena)

The iPad Air models use two speakers on the top and bottom. Meaning, when the iPad is rotated horizontally, you get stereo sound — that’s why Apple calls it “landscape stereo”. The speakers sound pretty good. Nice bass, good detail in the mids, which makes the vocals in songs pop out and the voice in YouTube videos be always audible, and a nice hissy air in the highs.

If we compare them directly to the quad speakers in an iPad Pro, the Air does sound a bit crunchy in the mids and a little bit tinnier. But that’s when doing 1-to-1 nitpicking. Otherwise, the iPad Air sounds great, don’t sweat it.

This probably goes without saying, but there’s no headphone jack on the iPad Air. If you want to use such, your options are either a wireless set or connecting an audio interface to the USB C port. But then, charging will be off limits while using the interface, unless you are connected to a Magic Keyboard, which adds an extra USB C port to the iPad Air.

There are no haptics on the iPads. Arguably, you don’t really need vibration on a tablet, at least we don’t miss it when using iPadOS.

iPad Air M3 Battery and Charging

The iPad Air 11″ M3, supposedly, has around 7,600 mAh battery while the 13″ — around 9,700 mAh. Apple doesn’t really reveal batteries in mAh, teardowns do that. So, for now, we wait.

What we do know is that we typically expect 8-10 hours of on time from an iPad, depending on what you are doing. Web browsing drains them the least, YouTube streaming does require some more juice, and gaming will melt them a bit faster, of course. Here are our test results:

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:

The results are not far from our expectations, but ouch that gaming test really did run through the battery. That M3 chip may be powerful, but it seems it’s thirsty for some juice. 

Sweet, sweet USB-C (Image credit – PhoneArena)

There’s no update on the charging front, so you will still be juicing up with 20 W from the wallplug (ahem, not included). This means that a full charge will take you more than 2 hours. Not ideal. Considering that tablets are meant to be static devices, less carried-around like we do with smartphones, it’s mostly fine. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been in a pickle, where I forgot to charge the iPad and was down to 10%, and had to go. Powerbank in the backpack, here we go again!

The main camera of the iPad Air M3 is a singular 12 MP snapper. Nothing fancy, nothing high-res — but good enough for the emergency picture to share “what’s happening right now”, or to scan documents.

On the front, there’s another 12 MP camera with an ultra-wide lens. This is because Apple has been using Center Stage on all its tablets for a while now. If you don’t know — Center Stage is the feature where the software “follows” your face around, so you are a bit less… restrained while in a video call or in a meeting. It will also intelligently zoom out if another face steps into frame. In general, it’s a pretty cool feature and I keep it on all the time.

Video Quality

As we are used to, the selfie quality from the iPads is pretty good. Even as the light goes down, it will have a good amount of exposure around where your face is detected. Some noise does creep in, details do get softer. But skintone remains consistent, and image quality is OK (and quite good if you consider that image will be compressed and sent over the voice call to look even worse anyway).

Photo Quality

The main camera has a bit of a narrow dynamic range and the old-style iPhone yellow-ish cast. We can also spot a good amount of oversharpening going on, as the tree branches begin to look jagged. With picture, the noise from the selfie camera is also more visible than it was on video. It starts creeping in at medium light, but the quality is still passable for meetings and calls. It really comes in at low light, but that makes sense — don’t take calls in a dark room!

 

Should you buy it?

It’s great, but also puzzling (Image credit – PhoneArena)

On one side, the iPad Air has pretty much everything you’d want from a tablet. A powerful chip that has enough headroom to last you a good amount of years, good speakers, and a screen that looks good.

But then, that same screen is locked at 60 Hz to nudge you towards the Pro, the chip is a bit battery-hungry, and if you want to add extra accessories like the Keyboard and Pencil — you go into laptop price territory (and a good laptop at that).

So yes, the iPad Air M3 delivers a ton of punch, then pulls back on some features that are readily available from the competition. But, in the end, as a package… it’s kind of the top dog in its class.