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Apple iPad Air (2020)

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This year’s finest tablet
Apple’s iPad line defines tablets for most people. iPads are powerful, widely known, and simple; most schools and businesses understand and cater to iPad users. This year, the $599 iPad Air offers so much more than the $329 base iPad that it’s worth taking the step up if you can afford it. For the increase in price, you get a larger screen, stronger audio, faster networking, a much more powerful processor, better Apple Pencil support, and a superior build. That makes the fourth-generation iPad Air a good long-term investment and the best Apple tablet to buy in 2020. It also earns the iPad Air our Editors‘ Choice award for high-end tablets. I’m not going to spend this review explaining what an iPad is in general or going over the details of iPadOS—I encourage that you take a look at our full iPadOS review if you want details. Rather, I’d like to tell you why this iPad is the one you want. A High-End Design With its hard metal frame, the iPad Air looks and feels like an iPad Pro rather than the traditional rounded iPad. It’s almost the same size as the current 10.2-inch iPad, although it’s a touch slimmer and lighter. I remember the original Air was a revelation when it clocked in at one pound, and this model sticks to that weight. The iPad Air has a flat back and squarer edges than the standard model The Air fits a 10.9-inch,2,360-by-1,640 screen into the same body size as the 10.2-inch iPad by reducing the bezels. All iPads have 264ppi screens, so as they get larger, you just get more real estate; this screen, therefore, gives you just about as much surface area as the 11-inch iPad Pro. It’s laminated with an anti-reflective coating that makes it much less reflective, and more pleasantly usable, than the standard iPad’s screen; it also has Apple’s wide color gamut, which I’ve never really personally noticed. The top and bottom of the tablet have powerful stereo speakers, which give real, two-channel stereo sound in landscape mode; on the lower-cost iPad, the speakers are only at the bottom. On the top of the tablet, there’s a really cool innovation in the form of a power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor. This means the Air doesn’t have to have a big bezel for a physical Home button, but it can also use a fingerprint sensor so you don’t have to futz around with trying to face-unlock the tablet when you’re wearing a mask. Unleash the Power The new iPad Air uses an Apple A14 processor with 4GB of RAM and either 64GB or 256GB of storage. It’s the fastest iPad available, and benchmarks faster than any Android device, as well. Here are the numbers: Our iPad Air scored 639,962 on the Antutu benchmark; 595 on Basemark Web; 1,572 single-core and 3,931 multi-core on Geekbench 5; 108,481 on 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited; and 12,331 on Geekbench’s GPU Compute benchmark. See How We Test TabletsSee How We Test Tablets That’s 20 percent higher on Geekbench Multicore and 22 percent better on web browsing than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, the most powerful Android device currently available. It’s 58 percent faster on Geekbench and 44 percent faster on Antutu than the base 2020 iPad. This is a super-fast chipset. The 2020 models of the iPad Pro use an A12Z processor with eight CPU and eight graphics cores, as opposed to the A14’s six CPU and four graphics cores. Each of the A14 cores is better, but the A12Z has more of them, so comparing the Air to the Pro is a mixed bag. The Air scored about the same on 3DMark as the Pro and scored 25 percent better on the Geekbench Compute benchmark, but got overpowered by sheer coreage on some of the other tests. The Pro scored 15 percent ahead of the Air on Antutu, and 16 percent better on Geekbench multi-core. I don’t have a Surface Go 2 on hand for comparisons, but Geekbench’s browser says that the Intel Core m3 version scores up to 1605 in multi-core—less than half of what the A14 accomplishes. All of these numbers mean absolutely impeccable performance on the iPad Air. No matter what I was doing, whether it was video chats, action games, or Apple Pencil-enabled art programs, it was smooth and responsive. The one weak spot in this entire review is battery life: iPads have never been great at screen-on time in our tests. This one managed to stream YouTube for just 4 hours,45 minutes before needing a charge, even shorter than previous models.

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