It's another iPad. It's the iPad Air M4.
It looks about the same design-wise as the previous generation because Apple
figured out how iPads are supposed to look and just kind of stuck with that
like, you know, if it works, why change it? Why fix what ain't broke? So, yeah,
it's got an M4 this time instead of an M3. But it's not just the chip. There's
actually a few other interesting hardware upgrades that they made. Not on
the outside, though. They're inside, which is what counts in case you never
heard that before. But just to make sure we're not missing anything, let's take a
look at the outside. So, this is the what' you call it? Platinum
>> Starite. >> Starite. But yeah, there you go. If
you've uh seen an iPad Air that was made in the last, you know, 3 or 4 years,
this will look very familiar to you. It's still got that kind of squareedged
design. On the back, we've got the Apple logo. We've got the pogo pins down there
at the bottom and the 12 megapixel
camera which has the exact same specs as the previous gen. On this side, we've
got the volume buttons there and the
pencil mount which is compatible with the Apple Pencil USBC as well as the
pencil pro. And that's reminding me of that whole debacle with where they
released the USBC charging version of the Apple Pencil because it wasn't
compatible with one of the iPads because they moved the camera up here on the long side and they had they had the same
mount. Good times. On the bottom here, we've
got the two speaker grills, one of which is fake. They keep putting them on
there, though. It's cuz they're just reusing the chassis from iPad Pro,
basically. But like one of these has has a speaker in it, and the other one is a
hilarious prank they're pulling on. In the middle is a USBC port for charging
and data and display too, I think. Yeah.
On this side, nothing except a little bit of text. Actually, I've never
noticed that before. It says Apple Inc. iPad Air. It has charging numbers. I've
never noticed that before. If that was there on previous iPads, I've never seen
it. But like, what is that? That's saying what this can be charged at.
Usually, you only see that kind of thing on a charger and not on the device
itself. It's kind of cool. Apple. Yeah.
And on the last side that we haven't
looked at the we got two more speaker
grills. Oh, one of them has less holes.
Which one's the real speaker one? We'll find out. And then a uh power button/
fingerprint reader. Nice to see. Or Touch ID. Sorry. Sorry, Apple. Sorry.
Touch ID. And then there's the display itself. We have the
>> 11 in >> iPad Air here. Uh same display, same
exact specs. uh 500 nits. As I said, all
of the upgrades are inside, but I neglected to do the thing you're
supposed to do in an unboxing, which was actually take look at the other stuff in
the box. And we got uh some papers with
some Those are pretty Wow, those are nice pictures. Documentation. You do
read through all of that before you turn it on, but uh I won't today, but you
should. And then uh we got a charger. How long How big is it? Is it 20 watts?
It's 20 watts. and a nice cable. I like
I like these uh sleeved cables that Apple's been using for some time now.
I'm going to say that's 3 ft 3 and 1/2 ft maybe. All right,
let's enter iPad OS after this segue to
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And there you have it. I feel like I'm back in Apple's golden era already. I
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my bosseshort.com. Okay, the iPad Air M4 experience. Like,
look at that. W I'm so glad we needed a new chip.
Now, as usual, it's a new chip, M3
versus M4 in the iPad Air. So, you're getting an upgrade just in terms of like
raw performance. It does have the same amount of cores. Both have eight cores,
but now we're dealing with three performance and five efficiency cores
versus four and four on the M3. Slightly higher CPU clock speed as well. And as
is usually the case with the version of the chip that gets shipped on an iPad,
the M4 here has one less GPU core than the M4 in a Mac. However, it's not just
kind of like faster cores and slightly different CPU configuration. There has
been a major RAM upgrade. Interestingly, in the age of the RAM crisis, Apple has
taken the iPad Air M3, which had 8 gigs
of LPDDR5 RAM, and upgraded it in the
M4, to 12 GB of LPDDR5X.
I think I added an extra D in there, but we'll leave it. So, you get more RAM,
and it's faster. It's got 120 GB per second memory bandwidth now instead of
just 100 which I guess puts us in this interesting position now of having an
iPad Air that is the same price as the MacBook Neo actually 599 but you get
more RAM in this one. You got 12 gigs in this 8 gigs in the MacBook Neo. However,
you have 256 gigs of starting storage with the MacBook Neo and this thing only
starts with 128. It's all fun. It's just kind of like a guessing game. It's like
what do we got? That RAM upgrade is extra interesting to
me in particular because I'm someone who has always appreciated the iPad as a
potential, you know, laptop replacement. And I think part of the reason why I was
so interested in the iPad as like a potential laptop replacement was because
they Apple didn't have a lower-end
MacBook. Like the lowest MacBook that they had was the MacBook Air, which has
been like kind of around that $1,000 price point for a long time. This thing
starts at $600 and you can get it for
550 as a student US, but it doesn't come with a keyboard, but it has 12 gigs of
RAM and a more powerful processor than the MacBook Neo. Oh my goodness. Smaller
screen, 11 in. Thank you. There's a 13-in version of this, but that's more
expensive. Apple makes everything so fun. But anyways, other
than that M4 chip upgrade, uh, you know, I alluded to some other internal
upgrades that Apple has made this generation. There's an Apple modem in
here. There's the Apple C1X modem instead of the Qualcomm modem, although
that's in the 5G version, which we don't have. We got the the normal one. And for
other wireless connectivity, Apple's now put their N1 firstparty chip in here
instead of the Broadcom chip that they were using before. And I don't know
whether it's because of that or not, but the M4 has some upgraded standard
support. So, it supports Wi-Fi 7 now instead of 6E and Bluetooth 6 instead of
Bluetooth 5.3. So altogether, you know, compared to last year, which was like
basically just the M3 chip versus the M2, this is a fairly acrosstheboard
update in terms of hardware. Obviously, no, we got the same cameras and the same
display, same battery, even battery size. One thing I didn't mention because
um I don't really care about it, but some people might, uh the NPU in the M4
chip is apparently much better. It's got
up to a 111% performance boost. 38
trillion operations per second versus 18 trillion operations per second. So if
you run uh local LLMs on your iPad,
somebody does and they'll be really excited. As is tradition though, we will
check out the display and the speakers, see how they make us feel on an
emotional level. You know, I will say that like it is a tablet, but to me I
even iPad Pro is kind of like the the standard the the gold standard of like
speakers in a tablet on the market, but like iPad Air has always been pretty
good, too, even though they only have two speakers in those four grills that
we mentioned. All right, Krabs. Hi, Mr. Krabs.
That's Max.
Oh, I got to check where the speakers were.
Yeah, speakers are in the bottom of those two grills. If you're looking at
it in laptop mode, that's where the speakers are. Okay, the camera's there.
The speakers there. Okay, write that down.
See, I think
a lot more bass than you would expect to get out of a a dinky little tablet, but
there's still very much like there's some bass and there's some highs and the
mids are just kind of like where are they at? They took a break. But um
that's at max volume. Turning it down a
little bit. You know, it's it's a little bit better
to represent at least subjectively. The
display, I mean, you know, what's what is there to say? It looks nice. Oh,
let's let's up the resolution. It looks nice. You know, it's no iPad Pro, but
you know, it's an IPS display. It's an iPad Air. It's not the cheapest iPad.
It's in, you know, it's funny to to compare this to the MacBook Neo. It's
such an interesting We got an iPhone chip in a in a MacBook now because there
are iPads with iPhone chips, but they're
not pro chips. I feel like I would love to do a video kind of going over iPad OS
and where that is at now. Because now that we have a like cheap MacBook, the
question of whether anyone should be trying to get an iPad to replace their
laptop is just so much more interesting. The the guys are saying I should play a
game, but I have I have not played a game on any one of these iPad short
circuits. Who's that? You play as a baby. Oh, look. It wants me to look with
that. This is not fun. I would not want to play a game like this. You guys can't
even see it. It's so dark. Look at Oh, I'm holding a baby now. I want to play
this game just to protect that baby. iPads can game now. They've been able to
game for a long time. They've been able to do a lot of stuff for a long time.
And if you use an iPad for anything other than watching Netflix or YouTube
or whatever, uh this will be an exciting upgrade, not only because of the upgrade
to the M4 chip, but also those other upgrades that I mentioned. Apple is
doing some pretty good things out here. you know, like in a in an industry that
feels like it's pulling the rug out from under us at every opportunity, Apple is
kind of like, you know what, we are going to give you an upgrade uh to a
better chip and just better everything and launch it at the same price as last
year. Like it's almost like Apple is just in their little bunker and the
industry is happening. Stuff's happening out there and they're just like, I don't
care. It feels like Apple only ever does what they originally planned to do
except when it comes to the AI upgraded Siri. Other than that, uh Apple is an
exciting company to pay attention to right now and uh I hope to continue
paying attention to them and I hope you continue paying attention to short
circuit videos. Uh thanks for watching guys. Subscribe to the channel. Uh if
you're looking for something else to watch, go watch the MacBook Neo video
cuz that's exciting. What a time to be alive.
Bye.