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The M2 iPad Air is $30 off if you preorder at Amazon
Apple’s refreshed mid-range tablet will ship this week.
Apple last week refreshed its iPad lineup by upgrading the iPad Pro and iPad Air. The latter got its first hardware update in over two years. The latest iPad Air is powered by an M2 chipset and it ships on May 15. If you’re interested in picking one up and haven’t yet done so, you’re in luck. You’ll get a $30 discount on the M2 iPad Air if you preorder one at Amazon. The discount is available on select models such as several colorways of the base 11-inch iPad Air with 128GB of storage, which drops to $570. The purple 256GB variant of the 13-inch iPad Air is also $30 off at $870.
Apple's new iPad Air with an M2 chipset is currently $30 off if you preorder through Amazon.
The M2 is one of the two major changes to the iPad Air this time around. The chipset is about 50 percent faster than the M1, according to Apple, so the latest model should be noticeably zipper than the previous generation. However, the iPad Pro is now significantly more powerful than the Air, as the high-end models arriving this week run on the new M4 chipsets, making them the first Apple devices to do so.
The screen is the other major change to the iPad Air. Not only is the base model’s display 0.1 inches larger, making it a tidier 11 inches, there’s a 13-inch variant of an iPad Air for the first time. That means the iPad Air has the same screen sizes as the iPad Pro (which is now somehow thinner and lighter than its mid-range sibling).
There’s one other immediately noticeable change to the iPad Air. The front-facing camera is now positioned along the landscape edge. That should make video calls a bit more palatable for those who tend to have their iPad in that orientation, including those who use keyboard attachments.
We gave the iPad Air a score of 91 in our review, dubbing it Apple's best tablet overall. The base storage increase (it has double the base storage of the previous generation), faster chip and reorientation of the front-facing camera are all major plus points. The 13-inch option is great too, particularly for those who want an iPad with a larger display without having to splash the cash on an iPad Pro.
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