Apple slips an m4 into the ipad air and quietly kills your laptop
If you just bought a MacBook Air, cancel the shipment. Apple’s new iPad Air with M4 delivers 30 % more raw power than last year’s model, starts at €649 and weighs less than a paperback. The only thing it refuses to do is fold.
The chip that ate the mac
Inside the 6.1 mm frame sits a down-clocked but still ferocious M4: 8-core CPU, 9-core GPU with hardware ray-tracing and a 16-core Neural Engine. Translation? Photoshop exports that used to wheeze on my 2022 MacBook Pro now finish before the coffee hits the desk. Apple pairs the silicon with 12 GB of unified memory, so the tablet keeps 37 browser tabs, a 4 K multicam timeline and a AAA game suspended without a hiccup. The thermal envelope is so relaxed the chassis never crosses 38 °C; there’s no fan, no whine, no drama.
Yet the spec sheet hides a sting. The 11-inch variant clings to a 60 Hz LCD panel capped at 500 nits. Swipe fast and the ghosting reminds you this is still Air, not Pro. Apple could have cannibalised the OLED line early; instead it handed Samsung and Huawei one last bragging right.
Ports, pencils and the long day
USB-C now moves data at 10 Gb/s, enough to drive a 6 K external monitor without compressing the colour space. Add Wi-Fi 7 and the tablet pulls 2.4 Gbps from a 6 GHz router—handy when your flight’s hotspot is a lie. Battery life sticks to the familiar 9-10 hour plateau; the glass is the ceiling, not the chemistry. What changes is how you top up: 30 W brick sold separately, because Apple still believes every box is a profit centre.
The Pencil Pro magnetises to the right edge and now offers barrel-roll detection for illustrators. I watched a Barcelona concept artist sketch a 300-layer fresco; latency stayed at 6 ms even when she zoomed to 800 %. The tablet never asked for a charger.
Who actually needs this?
Students scribbling lecture notes will feel the difference in two years when iPadOS 28 drops support for A-series chips. For creators, the M4’s media engine encodes two streams of 8 K ProRes while you colour-grade in HDR—something the Intel fleet in most newsrooms still can’t do. The real buyer is the future-proof procrastinator: pay €649 today, skip the 2027 refresh and still own the fastest slab in the café.
Apple won’t admit it, but the Air just became the default Mac for anyone whose work lives in the cloud. The only password you still need is for denial.