$599 M4 iPad Air is a lot like the old one, but with a substantial RAM boost

Ars Technica · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

This version of the Apple M4 is slightly cut down compared to the version that ships in Macs or that came with the M4 iPad Pro. It has only 8 CPU cores—3 high-performance cores and 5 efficiency cores, down from a maximum of and 4 and 6. It also uses 9 GPU cores instead of 10, and there isn’t an Air variant with 16GB of RAM. A 16GB RAM configuration was available for M4 iPad Pros with 1TB or 2TB of storage. Otherwise, very little has changed about the new iPad Air. It still comes in four relatively muted color options (space gray, blue, purple, and a pale gold “starlight”), still uses a regular 60 Hz LCD display rather than an OLED or ProMotion screen, still uses a power button-mounted TouchID sensor rather than FaceID, and still includes a single-lens 12MP rear camera with no flash. Apple continues to not offer its nano-texture display coating for the Air, either—that’s reserved exclusively for higher-end iPad Pro configurations. The new iPad Air is part of a string of announcements that Apple is planning in the run-up to a “special experience” event on Wednesday morning. The company also announced a new iPhone 17e today and is widely expected to debut a new low-end iPad and a new MacBook that’s substantially cheaper than the MacBook Air. This piece was updated at 11:15am on March 2 to add details about the M4 chip’s CPU core configuration.