This is the new iPad Air, and the big surprise for me is that it now has an M1 chip.
So that's got a lot of people curious about whether it's worth upgrading to.
Oh! Like my friend Nicole here.
Well, let's find out for her. And what I learned in doing so is that there's actually an iPad performance tier list.
And if you're in the beat here, this may or may not be worth upgrading to.
When I reviewed the $800 M1-powered iPad Pro last summer, I felt that its price and its
power were higher than its utility, even for professionals.
Because iPad OS is still quite limited, and it's really easy to run into workflow walls.
In fact, I called it a luxury device.
It really is one, so I don't think that the iPad Air needs all that power.
The upgrade from the Pro that I think would best trickle down to this is the high refresh
rate ProMotion screen. An M1 processor might make your device faster, but ProMotion makes your device appear faster.
But I don't work at Apple, and besides, Nicole's iPad Pro already has ProMotion.
So why did you reach out to me?
I reached out to you because I have the 2018 iPad Pro, and it's the 11-inch.
The 2022 iPad Air is a similar form factor.
It is also more reasonably priced. It has the M1 processor, and it has more RAM.
So on paper, looking at those specs, yeah, I was like, ooh.
So you're just using your iPad really intensely?
I guess subtle for an average casual user, just using it to browse.
I think you're more than an average casual user, from what you've told me.
I'm an average casual user, and then hearing how you use it, I'm like, oh, maybe some people
are using it more intensely than I thought originally.
Well, I came from a MacBook, so I wanted to use it for everything I did on the MacBook.
OK, so I wanted to show me how you use your iPad.
Above first, how's your battery? Ah, it's not looking too good.
Oh, 3%. Oh, perfect. Oh, awesome.
Thanks, Jamie. Wow. Nicole's A12X-powered iPad Pro from 2018 has always confused me.
It's in the A12 processor generation, which is old.
But if you look at the processor itself, it looks an awful lot like an M1.
In fact, the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit was essentially powered by one of these.
And so if there were an iPad performance tier list, I wouldn't know where this would go.
So how many apps do you run at the same time? Because like, do you sometimes have two apps open, the YouTube app video playing, slide
over? Yeah. OK, so YouTube is playing.
You can open up the comments as well. I'll usually open up something like my journal.
I'll open up Instagram, which is pretty gross on this app.
Zuckerberg let Instagram make an iPad app. It's not running on so many levels.
Oh! OK. So then I end up having to like, you know, slide back and forth, back and forth.
And then I'll usually open up something like Reddit.
Oh, and then there it goes. Oh, but it's reloading. It was playing before.
It was playing before. OK. Oh, now it won't even.
Oh! We had just, this was just open a second ago.
It was. I know it's, but that is annoying. I can't see the cute cat thing anymore.
See, and then this will just kind of like, oh, OK, well, how am I going to see the cats
now? How am I going to find this post again if I reopen this, you know?
I think that RAM might be the biggest issue here. The way iPadOS manages RAM is that it purges apps that you haven't used in a while from
memory as you open more. This prevents slowdowns in open apps, but it also means that when you do go back, you're
going to have to wait for those apps to reload.
This is not the same video. Yeah, it isn't. Oh, no.
And now. It stopped playing and you can't get it to play again.
So I just. It changed the progress bar. Oh, it did change the progress bar.
But it's the wrong video. It is. And then I'll have to disconnect it.
You have to disconnect. And then I have to reconnect it.
And we are. Oh, now it's resetting the whole app. Yes.
So what happens? This is what can happen if you fail your iPad's RAM.
Nicole's iPad Pro only has four gigabytes. So there's a chance that the eight in the iPad Air might make the difference.
They do.
It looks so fast. It's so much like that's crazy how that fast look at this.
Wow. See. See, do you do you go?
I mean by like it feels snappier. It does feel snappier. Okay.
Let's let's rotate it. So this is how I'd usually use it.
Yeah. Okay. So, okay.
Yeah, it is snappier. So how does it compare to your iPad?
If I were to have multiple apps open and I'm just scrolling through them, it will still
like give it a little moment to reload, but it'll be much snappier.
I felt one difference that I noticed, but I don't think it would be as emphasized is
the 120 Hertz refresh rate. Personally, I don't watch a lot on my iPad, but the area I did notice it the most is switching
between apps.
It seems that the M1's extra RAM doesn't seem to be making all that much of a difference
here. So what is? I did a bunch of testing to compare all the recent iPads to each other and that's how
I came up with the iPad performance tier list.
They're weirdly grouped together and not according to processor number.
F tier is easy. It's all those iPads that don't support the latest iOS.
Above it in the E tier is those powered by an A8X chip, A9, A9X chip and A10 chips because
of the similar results in Geekbench. D is anything powered by an A10X chip or a 12 chip.
C tier, which is quite close to D, is the A13 powered iPad.
The reason for this was when I did my Lightroom raw export test, the new iPad was around two
minutes faster than the D tier.
And those numbers showed what was most interesting.
The B tier. It contains Nicole's iPad Pro, the 2020 model of the same, the outgoing A14 powered iPad
Air and the A15 powered iPad Mini.
If you look at all their Geekbench scores, you can see that they're quite close.
Single cores are slower in the older devices, but multi-core and graphics are virtually
the same. And when exporting raws, they're all within 15 seconds of each other.
So what's in the A tier? Well, it's this iPad Air and yeah, while I made these tiers up, it explains why Nicole
might not be compelled to upgrade. This is only one tier away from her iPad, despite being almost four years newer.
Now, this list focuses mainly on processing power, but we could reorganize the list with
an emphasis on RAM. It's different, but not by much.
Because of the way iPad OS works, it's hard to feel the impact RAM capacity makes.
So I think the performance tier list is probably more pertinent for more people.
Alright, so what's in the S tier though?
It's the M1-powered iPad Pro if you get 1TB of storage or more, because those models
get 16GB of RAM. So S means stupid expensive.
Now while the iPad Air is in the A tier in performance, it's really a B plus compared
to the iPad Pro, all things considered.
This $600 price tag is very close to the iPad Pros, which for about $150 more differentiates
itself with exclusive luxury features like Face ID instead of Touch ID, which is more
convenient, two rear cameras with flash and LiDAR, Thunderbolt support, and the high speed
Pro motion screen. That's a really nice feature.
On the flip side, the basic iPad is almost half the price with less than half the performance.
And that's become a much bigger gap with nothing in between.
Otherwise, apart from the M1 chip, the iPad Air gets very little in additional improvements.
Storage tiers stay stubbornly at 64GB and 256GB.
The front camera is now an ultra-wide unit with center stage.
Cellular models have 5G radios, and there are different colors with the abandonment
of green and the new darker blue and the addition of this purple, which I do kind of like.
What would you recommend then to perhaps iPad users?
I feel like if you are currently on a 2018 iPad Pro and you're looking for a step up
in performance, for example, if you are a professional user and using this for a main
device to create things, then it would be beneficial maybe to look into the new line
of iPad Pros, whereas if you are a new user in the world of iPads and you're looking
to go into using iPadOS, then I would highly recommend looking at the 5th Gen iPad Air lineup.
So would you upgrade? If I didn't already have an iPad, I would definitely get the 2022 iPad Air.
There are two things that surprised me when evaluating this new iPad Air.
The first is that I'm finding an emerging group of people who are switching to the iPad
as their mobile computing device. In fact, on the day I picked this up, I talked with a guy who switched completely away from
his MacBook to two iPads, a mini and a big pro.
And then of course, there's Nicole too. This means that despite iPadOS' limitations, these people are finding ways to push their
tablets. The other surprise is how close and how clear the performance tier list is.
I was not expecting to see four completely different models released over four years
virtually perform identically. It's good to know because you can see how much of an upgrade you'll be getting between
the models. The iPad Air then is a buy for people in the D tier or below.
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