An iPad Air refresh shouldn’t provide much room for rumination. Boiled down, the latest version, even with an upgraded M3 processor, is still the same mid-range Apple tablet. It comes in a host of pleasing colors, it’s light, and it’s powerful enough for most tasks you would use your tablet for. And still, even when I bring it out for all my usual tasks, I can’t help thinking the latest iPad Air is less the middle child of Apple’s tablet lineup but the odd duckling struggling to find a niche.
iPad Air 2025 with M3
It’s a refresh to Apple’s solid mid-range tablet, but it lacks the versatility, power, or price of its other iPads.
Pros
- Nice, bright display
- New Magic Keyboard is a good upgrade from previous gen
- Good performance uptick over M1 iPad Air
Cons
- Very minimal performance upgrade over 2024 iPad Air
- Still not as thin and light as iPad Pro, despite the name
- Prices for Magic Keyboard edge way too close to the cost of a full MacBook
The iPad Air 11 with M3 is fine for certain tasks, but it can’t be your cheaper MacBook with a touchscreen. It’s better than last year’s model, but good enough may not be enough to justify the upgrade for lingering M1 iPad Air users. I prefer the latest iPad mini for simpler tasks. The iPad Pro is the easy choice for anything that demands more processing power. Like last year, there is a 13-inch version of the Air available, but whereas I may want more screen on an iPad Pro, the iPad Air feels a better fit on a smaller display.
The iPad Air 11 with M3 starts at $600. It has 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage at the low end. This version of the M3 comes with a 9-core GPU, the same as last year’s lower-end MacBook Air models. If you missed the news last year, Apple made a few improvements to its tablets, such as moving the 12 MP Center Stage camera to the landscape edge. Just like last year’s versions, it supports Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil USB-C (though none of the previous-gen stylus). Otherwise, it contains the same IPS LCD Liquid Retina display, which is good enough for dark rooms or indirect light with relatively minimal glare.
I am writing this part of the review on the iPad Air with the new, improved, though still overly-expensive Magic Keyboard. It has a function row, which proves handy for changing the brightness on the fly, but at the 11-inch size, it costs an extra $270. The 13-inch version asks for $320. That’s far more expensive than other third-party keyboard options, but it is one of the best you can get for the iPad. It also means the larger iPad Air costs $800, along with the Magic Keyboard, more than the new base MacBook Air M4.
If you’re already used to the MacBook’s keyboard, the new version for Air is a surprisingly easy and comfortable typing experience. Just know that even with iPadOS, the tablet cannot possibly match the versatility of Apple’s laptop suite. It leaves me with this empty feeling, staring at a device I know I wouldn’t reach for first compared to either of its tablet siblings. It may fit within your budget; if that’s the case, it’s a solid choice. Then again, if you want a tablet that excites the imagination, this certainly isn’t it.
iPad Air M3’s Performance is a Slight Jump From Last Year’s
There is a world of difference in performance between an iPad with Apple’s M-series silicon versus a model with an A16 and A17 chip, which makes a noticeable difference in more-intensive apps. The M3 is more powerful than the previous-gen iPad Air with M1. As for how well it holds up against 2024’s M2, the M3 is a minuscule upgrade,
Apple was far more keen to compare older-gen iPads to the newer models. The iPad Air from 2022 may look very, very similar to the one from 2025, but there is a big difference in speeds for both computing and graphics tasks. Just in 3D Mark Wild Life Unlimited and Wild Life Extreme Unlimited tests, the M3 gets an average 30% boost over the tablet from three years ago. Then, compared to the iPad Air M2 from 2024, the CPU sees a nominal increase in Geekbench 6 tests from 9,993 to 11,835 multi-core scores in 2025. That’s approximately a 15% uptick.
That’s not too surprising, though, with the new 7th-gen iPad Air, the M3 also has support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This might matter in a game like War Thunder: Mobile, but there are a few situations where ray tracing may matter to your tablet experience.
For the sake of graphics-intensive tasks, the M3 iPad Air can’t match anywhere close to the performance of the iPad Pro with the M4. It shouldn’t, considering the Pro costs $400 at the same size. A M4 iPad Pro 13 can hit 600 more points in Geekbench 6 single-core and does 2,700 points better in multi-core. The difference is more stark when testing the GPU capabilities. 3D Mark Steel Nomad Lite benchmarks show the M4 can do 1,150 more points than the M3 iPad Air. Do I even need to mention that the iPad Air is actually thicker and heavier than the latest iPad Pro? The iPad Air is .24 inches and 1.01 pounds compared to the iPad Pro’s .21 inches and .98 pounds.
If you’re considering the Pro versus the Air for the sake of rendering tasks, the M3 tablet is considerably slower. In my tests with the Screws scene in Octane X, the 11-inch Air was about 16 seconds slower on average. For AI performance, Geekbench AI shows the neural engine on the iPad Pro outstrips the iPad Air by around 640 points in quantized score. The real question is whether you will want to use or abuse AI on the M3 iPad Air, but it seems either way, it may not matter soon.
AI on the iPad Air M3 Isn’t a Big Reason to Upgrade
We tested the iPad Air on iPadOS 18.3. The hope was that iPadOS 18.4 or 18.5 would have brought even more AI capabilities, but the iPad Air release is suffering through some awkward timing. On Friday, Apple finally acknowledged it was delaying some of the most-anticipated features of Apple Intelligence, namely an upgraded Siri with more conversational capabilities and the ability to work across apps. Apple hasn’t stated how long these features may be delayed, but Bloomberg said we could be sitting on our hands until 2026. Maybe by then, we’ll have an iPad Air M4.
So what about what’s there already? Siri still has access to ChatGPT on more complicated queries, but these summaries are often clipped and short on details. Other features like Writing Tools allow you to proofread or summarize some of your written work or any other on-screen text. Some handy applications include making a table out of your bullet points. That proved handy for turning the benchmark numbers for this review into rows and columns. It can also cut down a long PR email and make it somewhat more legible, though Apple’s AI tends to cut out important notes when summarizing text. As with most AI writing capabilities, they seem built for middle managers who want to diminish the effort of workers who send their bosses detailed emails.
Then there’s Image Playground, an AI image generator constrained by a selection of preset themes and styles. I added a picture of me into the generator, and it made me appear far more gaunt than I am and aged me by approximately 10 to 30 years. It also had an obsession with placing objects atop my head, as if a bird were trying to build a nest on the peak of my noggin. When it’s not hilariously incompetent, the AI generator is incredibly boring.
Apple Intelligence is available to all M-series iPads, so it’s perfectly workable on the iPad Air M1 or iPad Air M2. For those using an older-series iPad, Apple Intelligence—or really any AI feature that’s not running on the cloud—doesn’t provide any tangible upgrade compared to past-gen iPads that don’t support it.
The iPad Air Feels Like the Bare-Minimum Refresh
I was once a notebook mainstay while GMing my in-person tabletop roleplaying group, but lately, I’ve turned to the iPad mini and an Apple Pencil Pro. This, I found, is the perfect size for me. I don’t need much else from my tablet that I can’t already get from a MacBook.
If I wanted to use Apple’s table line for real artistic or rendering tasks, the iPad Pro is easily your best choice. If you wanted the thinnest and lightest iPad, you used to reach for the Air. But, nowadays, if you want the thin iPad, you also go for the iPad Pro. The iPad Air merely has a better screen and better performance for streaming your content or basic productivity than the base iPad, which now comes with an A16 CPU. The base, nearly 11-inch Apple tablet that costs $350 is also the only one that doesn’t come with Apple Intelligence. I can’t say that the model is missing much.
At a certain point, I have to wonder why Apple didn’t call the 2024 big tablet launch the “iPad Air Pro” or “iPad Pro Air.” Perhaps that sounds more like if Apple strapped helicopter propellers to its tablet, but at least it would be more interesting than the iPad Air M3. I know some folk want an iPad Air because it seems slightly more powerful than a regular iPad, and they’re right. But if you can find an iPad Air M2 slightly cheaper, you’ll have the same experience with the M3.
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