The Apple iPad Air Gets a Supercharge With M4 Power-Up for Better Performance

Apple has had a busy few days here launching new versions of pretty much every one of their flagship creative products. Along with announcements of the new iPhone 17e, new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, a new MacBook Pro, a new MacBook Air, and a new MacBook Neo, we’ve also been introduced to a new iPad Air.

This new iPad Air will be powered by an M4, which will give it more memory and should help users get a major jump in performance—all while keeping the iPad Air at the same starting price point. Here’s what you need to know about this new model and what it could potentially offer for remote video editing, monitoring, or other filmmaking applications.

Apple iPad Air M4

Off the bat here, the big news is that the iPad Air is getting a boost with faster CPU and GPU, which should help with all types of tasks, whether those be surfing the web and gaming, or photo or video editing, or using Final Cut Pro for iPad.

“iPad Air gives users more ways than ever to be creative and productive, offering powerful performance and incredible versatility to help them turn their ideas into reality. With its blazing performance thanks to M4, incredible AI capabilities, and game-changing iPadOS 26 features, there’s never been a better time to choose or upgrade to iPad Air.” — Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

As is the case with all of the new Apple updates, a big focus is on these devices being better equipped to handle AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation.

Boosted Performance, Same Price

We can’t really understate how nice it is that this new model is getting such an improvement without any price increase. That’s always the goal, we feel, and it’s nice to see Apple actually be able to deliver here. The other news for the iPad Air is really just its improved speeds (up to 30% faster than the iPad Air with M3 and up to 2.3x faster than the iPad Air with M1).

The iPad Air will also get better connectivity with the latest Apple silicon N1 and C1X connectivity chips, which should help deliver faster wireless and cellular connections, as well as support for Wi-Fi 7, which should all help users work more remotely and from more exotic locales.

Price and Availability

Overall, the new iPad Air gets a nice boost overall with updates to its cameras, all-day battery life, a new app ecosystem, and other updates included with its new iPadOS 26. If you’re curious to check it out yourself, here are the full specs and purchase options.

• Apple M4 8-Core Chip
• 9-Core GPU | 16-Core Neural Engine
• 11" Liquid Retina Touchscreen
• 2360 x 1640 Screen Resolution (264 ppi)
• 12GB of RAM | 128GB Storage Capacity
• 12MP Landscape Center Stage Front Camera
• 12MP Wide Rear Camera
• Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) | Bluetooth 6
• USB-C Port (10 Gb/s)
• iPadOS with Apple Intelligence

Apple 11" iPad Air (M4, 128GB, Wi-Fi Only, Space Gray)

Now with the M4 chip, the Apple 13" iPad Air delivers optimal performance and is built for Apple Intelligence.