Wow, I haven't looked at an iPad unboxing it on on this channel since
2022, but I'm back now. They they
finally brought me back to look at the iPad Air M3. There's no M3 on there, but
I thought it was the iPad Air M3, which
by all accounts is that's how you take it out in case you were wondering. uh by
all accounts is very very similar to the iPad Air M2 because I mean Apple's
mostly just figured these things out by now like iPads are iPads you know that
especially with the Apple silicon M series chips it's going to be good you
if you told me this was a iPad from 2 or 3 years ago I'd believe you that said
the design hasn't worsened with age
still got these flat sides that originally showed up in the iPad Pro and
then they kind of trickled it down to their other designs And what what color is this? What is
this? A sky
blue? You're supposed to know. It's not sky blue. It's just blue. But the colors
that are available, the the body, the design in general, it's all the same.
Virtually the only thing that has changed is the chip inside used to be an
M2, which is fine. The M2 was was
already enough. So, Apple, what what are you you don't have to do this anymore.
What are you trying to prove? But I don't know, maybe there is something to
prove. We'll find out after we find out what else is in this box. It's probably
the same as the last time. Um, got a power adapter, which is 20
watts, and a USBC cord, which has this
new sleeved thing that Apple is putting on all their recent uh recent USBC
cords. I love it. All right. See, that's a big upgrade. We got the chip and the
cord. That is like 1 m or about 3 feet 3
in or something. Okay, do do the math. Now, we have the 11in version here, but
it also comes in a 13 in just like the previous model, which we also have right
here also in an 11 in. So, we can
directly compare just to make sure. Has anything really changed? Uh, one has
less scratches on it. That was you just now. Huh? That was you just That was me.
Yeah. on your laptop. So, I mean, you tell me. There's nothing really super
super obvious that has ch that has changed here. Volume up and down button
there alongside the magnetic mount for the pencil. On the top, we have the
Touch ID power buttons. Oh, and the two
speaker grills. Even though this is the iPad Air, and there's only one of these
that is active. Same with the grills on the other side. Nothing on this side.
And on the bottom, those same two speaker grills, only ones enabled. And
the USBC connector. Same USBC connector
as the previous gen. But the last iPad I
did, Can I leave him here? Can I do
that? Ah, I'm not going to do it. But the previous iPad I did was the
first iPad Air. No, that's not true.
Yeah, the bodies look basically the same
in terms of thickness. exactly the same.
That looks like a delicious iPad witch. So, yeah, that's what you're dealing
with. Same price as well. Starts at $600, which gets you the same starting
storage of 128 gigs. So, that's basically the story of the, you know,
the core of the device here. Same screen, same refresh rate, same
resolution, a lot of other stuff the same, but there are some things that are
different and some differences with accessories as well. And we'll talk
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shortlininus.com. All right, let's get on inside of this iPad and see whether
there's actually anything different. I mean, as I said, pretty much the only
difference between this iPad Air and the previous gen is the M3 chip versus the
M2. So, pretty much the only difference that you're going to experience in terms
of using it is the performance. So,
let's look at the performance. So, one thing to note while we're looking at
these numbers is that we can only compare the M3 iPad Air to the M1 iPad
Air because we didn't get an M2 iPad Air. We just thought, you know, it's
basically the same. No, that's not true. But just be aware,
we're not intentionally comparing this to a 3ear old product. That said, as an
owner of an M1 iPad Air, I'm interested in this because, you know, you're
probably not going to upgrade directly to the next gen every time they release
a new gen of iPad. But for M1 owners, this might be somewhat interesting. So,
let's take a look. What we got, at least in Geekbench here, is 32% uh M3 versus
M1 in single core. 38% better in
multi-core and 45% better in 3D Mark,
which is more of a GPU benchmark. During our stress test in 3D Mark, the first
run we did was incredibly high for the M3, but then it throttled quite a bit
for subsequent tests. Note that there's no active cooling. So, it's kind of like
it gets all the juice out and then it's kind of like somebody open a window. And
that leads the M3 to drop to like 60% of
its first run performance. That throttling means that the gap between
the M3 and the M1 was pretty big to
start with, but during the later runs, the M3 was only about 9% better in
performance. So, I guess that's something to keep in mind if you're going to be planning on using your iPad
Air for a really, really long time doing compute intensive things, which is like
is do those exist for the iPad? They do.
I But for who? For like five people. Moving
on. I don't know. Okay. Seriously though, guy, iPad people who use this as
like their full full computer and, you know, have a pro workstation built off
an iPad Air, I see you, okay? I know you exist.
Just I love you. As for brightness,
Apple says that this is supposed to get you 500 nits, same as the previous one,
and our Labs team found that to be true. But we did catch Apple lying about the
battery life of the of this thing. The iPad Air M3 is on paper it has the same
battery life as the iPad Air M1, but guess what? It's actually better. Uh the
the our Labs testing found that the M3 has improved battery life over the M1.
And so uh got you Apple. Got you so bad.
So there you have it for performance. I mean uh the end of the day breaking
news. The M3 is faster than the M2 and
M1. Uh there's not a whole lot of other competition out there for like mid
high-end smooth tablets. Uh but now we
know the one thing I was sort of interested in looking at on this one is
Apple intelligence features, but I haven't really even had a chance to to
look at them. That said, I think the
general consensus among Apple users out there right now is that the Apple
intelligence features are it's like
what? They're there. They're definitely there. I think everyone was really
waiting for the Siri, the upgraded AI Siri with the personal context and
ability to kind of like know when your mom's coming into the airport and stuff
and book a cab for her. But that's been delayed indefinitely and that's not here
yet. But what is here is Image Playground. This is still in
beta. The great thing about all these all these AI features are still in beta.
Describe an image or add a suggestion. I'm going to do it the lazy way. Do I
have to just tap it? Apple makes
it Apple makes this so easy that you don't even have to come up with words to
prompt it with. You just tap things. Fireworks and love. Scientist. Fireworks
and love. What you got for me? AI choose a
person. Very cool. Um, what are we
doing? Why Why do we have this? Cuz the other thing about image playground is
that you can't even it like it's an image generator, but it's got so many
guard rails on it. So, you can't even really make interesting images with it
from what I've seen. Oh, I can change the style illustration.
I love all these the previous in the
previous style they were all smiling and being like science and these people are
like I calculate things for my job. They
don't look excited at all. Who is that?
That looks like Michael Jackson. Okay,
now that I've seen Apple intelligence, I know that I'm not really missing
anything. Bring Siri. Bring the AI Siri and then we'll talk. Now, there's one
more new thing that Apple launched alongside this new iPad
Air, and it's this, a new Magic Keyboard. This is the updated Magic
Keyboard for the iPad Air M3, and it's
also compatible with the iPad Air 2, which launched alongside its own Magic
Keyboard that went for $300. This costs
$270. It's $30 cheaper and it's better.
It's got a larger trackpad and a row of
function keys joining the Magic Keyboard
that is for the iPad Pros in in having
this more kind of MacBook like function row on the top. Just like the other
Magic Keyboards, we've got this nice magnetic attachment and this floaty kind of
design. And although I guess it like yeah it looks like it's floating
uh less high above the ground than the Pro models, but maybe that's just
because it's an 11
in. That feels nice. It's very very thin
obviously. Um, and there's a little bit of a tactile bump that it it is actually
impressive that they managed to put a keyboard that feels this nice to tap on
to tap on to type on and made it this
thin. However, if you are kind of like adding a bit more power to your strokes
and going higher higher up, then when
you hit it, definitely feels like you're just kind of like tapping on nothing.
Yeah, if you keep it kind of closer to the keys, then it makes things feel a
little nicer. But yeah, I mean nothing, no complaints here. And the function row
just makes it better. Apple gets a lot
of crap from me included for, you know,
overpricing things, for not adding features when we want them, for making
things that don't make sense. But particularly with their more budget kind
of mid-range products, they've been doing a good job in just kind of making
them better and not giving them a huge price hike. Like the iPad is the same
price as the previous gen and it's better. The keyboard is cheaper than the
previous gen and better. You know, it's kind of something similar that we saw
with the Mac Mini release. Now, $380 is
also just the price of the base model
iPad. Uh but, you know, that's neither here nor there. At the end of the day,
credit where credit is due, Apple. Uh you know, with these mid-range products,
I'm happy with what you're doing. All right. One thing I did not check out yet
was the speakers and the, you know, kind
of looking at the screen and how it performs, doing cool stuff. So, let's
check that out. All right. How do the speakers
sound? Max. Max. Oh, screenshot.
Whoops. You know, as usual, Apple knows
how to make speakers for an iPad. you know, uh I I I still haven't seen anyone
else catch up with putting like actually
decent speakers. And this is only the one where there's only one speaker in
one of these grills. I think it's the the bottom one here. Somebody will figure it out eventually. I think the
Pixel Slate, I've mentioned this before, the Pixel Slate from many years ago that
had really good speakers, but other than
that, it's Apple. As with the previous gen, you've got a 60 Hz LCD IPS display
here. Apple calls liquid retina. And you
know, things look pretty good. Uh the only way you're going to get a better
image on an iPad is by upgrading to the iPad Pro. But not many people are going
to complain about this. What we may be able to complain about though is the
camera. So, let's check that out. I'm not sure though. I'm not sure. Oh, I
take it back. I don't know if I'll be able to complain about this. I mean, it's pretty good. All right. Ready?
Cheers to the good times. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I take it back.
Apple can still take 12 megapixels on the back and make it look nice. What
about the front though? Okay.
Ready? I look insane. I look out of my
mind. I always have this problem. I
think I'm doing a funny face, but I'm actually like I'm making people fear for
their lives probably. Like what? Don't say hi to that guy on the street.
Apple's technology did a really good job of capturing my abs absolute unhinged
nature. Okay, that's about enough of that.
So, Apple has delivered to us an iPad
Air with an M3 chip inside. They've
continued their process of kind of taking the desktop class chips that they
have in their MacBooks and just kind of handing them down to the iPads. And here
we are. I mean, it's not super exciting at this point after two generations of
Mclass chips and an iPad, but maybe we shouldn't be complaining about that. You
know, it's like Apple has very surely and slowly been marching towards this
future that uh was described many years ago where they think of the computer as
kind of a slate of glass that can do
almost everything. I look forward to
Apple adding more things to iPad OS, making more powerful iPads, even if for
most people spending $600, you know, plus $270 more on a
keyboard dock. Uh even if that doesn't make sense for most people, if you need
a tablet, probably go for one of the cheaper ones. But the iPad Air is kind
of here as an option for people with
money to blow and something that
represents the motion that I want Apple to keep doing. Uh make more powerful
tablets, make computers easier to use, make them able
to be used the way that you want them to be. So it put macOS on it and then that
would be it. This is it for this video
though. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to ShortCircuit. And if you're looking for something else to watch, uh, go
watch Lionus's video about the iPad Pro
M4, which basically represents the, you
know, a couple tiers up actually because you can upgrade this, but it's like, oh
my god.