Apple announces M3-powered iPad Air with improved Magic Keyboard layout

It’s not the update that most Apple watchers were hoping for, but today, Apple announced upgrades to two of its iPads, including the standard iPad and the quirky middle child, the iPad Air.

The iPad Air moves up from an M2 in last year’s Air refresh to an M3 chip, which is capable of Apple Intelligence and more graphics rendering. The Magic Keyboard gets a new layout with a larger trackpad and a physical function key row.

iPad Air and its Magic Keyboard.

Credit: Apple

That’s a notable upgrade for anybody doing real, portable-minded work with an iPad, but there’s even better news: The new Magic Keyboard with those physical keys is backward-compatible with previous iPad Airs: 4th and 5th generation, 11-inch M2 and M3, and 13-inch M2 and M3 models (better news, that is, if you’re good with the $270 price).

The new Airs ship in the same 11- and 13-inch sizes. Apple’s messaging about the new Air promotes the graphic performance of the M3 chip, saying it provides “up to 40 percent faster graphics performance over M1” and support for things like hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing. Perhaps more realistically than promising serious gaming on native iPad apps, Apple touts 4 times the performance of an M1 iPad Air for “graphics-intensive rendering workflows.”

The standard iPad, now with an A16 chip and 128GB base storage.The base iPad also got a boost today, earning an entire paragraph in Apple’s larger Air news release. It jumps up from an A14 to A16 chip inside and doubles its base storage from 64GB to 128GB. Apple cannot help but suggest that it’s “6x faster than the best-selling Android tablet,” which the company does not name (a footnote says the tablet is based on a Qualcomm SM6375 chip, so it’s almost certainly some kind of Samsung Galaxy device).

The standard iPad, new iPad Airs, and updated Magic Keyboard will be available on March 12. The iPad is $349 with 128GB storage, and the iPad Airs start at $599 and $799 for the 11- and 13-inch models, respectively.

This post was updated to clarify a point about Apple Intelligence availability on iPad Air models.