In Praise of the Apple iPad Air (Premium)

Some will be amused by this, and I suppose some will even be outraged. But there is just something special about the new iPad Air.

I wasn’t planning to write about the iPad Air. I mentioned it last week in New Year, New Travel Tech (Premium), in which I described a few of the travel and tech items that I recently purchased now that my wife and I are vaccinated and travel can happen again. And it will pop up in future “What I Use” columns, of course. But what can I possibly add to this discussion? I use the iPad only for entertainment (or “content consumption”) purposes, meaning reading and watching videos, mostly. So, much of the magic of this device, from its ability to replace a laptop, sort of, to its Apple Pencil 2 support, is just not of much interest to me day-to-day.

The iPad Air was one of two tech gadgets I purchased this past week in anticipation of future air travel, the other being a pair of Bose QuietComfort Earbuds. Both were replacements for products I had used previously that were each becoming problematic in their own way. My previous iPad, a 9.7-inch version that has gotten quite beaten up and has entered a death spiral of reliability issues, has long needed replacing, but it wasn’t an emergency when I was just using it around the house. And my previous Bose noise-canceling headphones were long overdue for a wireless replacement too. But I obviously haven’t needed noise-canceling anything while staying home for the past year or more. Well, now I do.

Anyway, if you look at Apple’s current iPad lineup and have followed the rumors about which of these devices will soon be updated, you can make a few generalizations. Two iPad models, the iPad mini and the iPad 10.2, both feature the old-fashioned iPad design with their large forehead and chin bezels, their round Touch ID buttons, and their Lightning connectors. And three, the iPad Air, iPad Pro 11, and iPad Pro 12.9, feature more modern designs with smaller bezels and USB-C connectivity. The iPad Pros use Face ID for signing-in, which I’d prefer, while the iPad Air has Touch ID built-in to a unique, small power button on the top edge of the device.

Were Apple planning to upgrade the iPad mini to the newer design style, which is shared with the iPhone 12 and SE handsets, I might have waited. But all the rumors are pointing to the same tired design, so no thank you.

That left a decision between an iPad Air and an iPad Pro, and given my entertainment focus and the high likelihood (OK, literal certainty) that I will not be switching to an iPad for my day-to-day productivity work, it made sense to save a bit of money and just go with the iPad Air. My theory was that it would be roughly the same size/weight as the iPad I was already using, but with several improvements that would hopefully help it feel like a good upgrade.

The iPad Air is less expensive than the 11-inch iPad Pro, but it’s still expensive. This newest generation Air was released in late 2020, and it starts at $599 for a version with Wi-Fi connectivity and 64 GB of storage. That’s the version I purchased, though I wish Apple had moved the base model to 128 GB of storage.

Compared to the current iPad, which has a 10.2-inch display, or the iPad 9.7 I was previously using, the iPad Air has some obvious advantages. It has a bigger and superior 10.9-inch display in the same basic form factor. It’s powered by a new-generation Apple A14 Bionic chipset, guaranteeing years of solid performance. And it has a quad-speaker setup that lets it emit stereo sound in either orientation. That latter bit is big for me: I often watch videos on the go with the iPad, and the previous versions all add a mono speaker setup on one side of the device. Awful.

But the iPad Air also has some advantages over the iPad Pro, go figure, starting with the cost: I saved about $100 by choosing the Air instead of the iPad Pro 11. But it also has a more modern and better-performing chipset; the iPad Pro comes with an older A12Z Bionic chip. (That will change soon when Apple refreshes the iPad Pros.)

Beyond that, there are some other more subjective things that I prefer about the iPad Air. It comes in five fun colors—I chose Green—where the iPad Pro can only be made in gray and dark gray. And it has a single camera lens (I’d rather it had none) rather than a giant camera array that I think looks big and ugly and is regardless superfluous to me.

Anyway, I bought the iPad Air and a (Cyprus Green) Smart Cover and figured it would be a quick transition: I’d delete all the Apple apps I will never use and install the handful of reading and video apps that I will use and get on with life. And that’s mostly true: From a day-to-day usage perspective, the new iPad Air offers basically the same experience as the device it replaced. When I travel, I will appreciate the stereo sound. But for now, it’s basically more of the same.

So why am I praising this device? It’s really for only one reason, but there are two parts and one requires a bit of a story, sorry. I noted above that I had purchased a Cyprus Green Smart Cover for the iPad Air, and that’s true; both arrived together last week. The problem is that Apple doesn’t make a Smart Cover for the iPad Air. The Smart Cover works with the 10.2-inch iPad, and I had ordered the wrong version, so I’d need to exchange it for something called a Smart Folio, which is compatible with the iPad Air. It’s like the Smart Cover, but it covers the back and the front while wrapping around the entire device. It’s more than I wanted—and more expensive—but that’s Apple for you.

I would have started an exchange immediately, but the Apple website didn’t provide a “return this item” link for the Smart Cover I bought by mistake, and I figured maybe that would change over a day or so. And so I just used the iPad Air—gingerly, given the expense—without a cover for a few days. And then for several days.

And then my wife asked about going to a restaurant in Whitehall, a township that’s 20-25 minutes away from here. Whitehall has a lot of retail stores and restaurants, including an Apple Store, so we left earlier than usual to head over there and exchange the Smart Cover for a Smart Folio. The refund/exchange experience was about as expected; Apple seems to have a good system for handling customers during the pandemic, and after about $30 more dollars were exchanged via a credit card, we walked out of the store with a new Smart Folio.

My wife, normally unimpressed by Apple and a veteran heckler of Apple fans out in public, remarked about how well the exchange had gone, kind of stopping me in my tracks. Of course it went well, I said: Middle-aged white guy walks into an Apple Store with an AMEX card and informs the staff that he’d like to replace a previous purchase with an even more expensive purchase. That’s peak Apple Store. Good point, she said, returning quickly to normal.

When we got home later that evening, I immediately put the Smart Folio on the iPad Air. It connects via a series of magnets and is much more secure than the Smart Cover had been on my previous iPads. It’s a smart-looking combination, frankly, with the darker green color of the Smart Folio nicely accented by the lighter green color of the iPad Air’s exposes edges. And it feels really nice having that cover material on both sides of the device. I know it’s only polyurethane, but it’s got a nice grippy feel to it and there’s something better about the experience of carrying the iPad Air because it feels the same on both sides.

And thanks to the iPad Air’s more angular design—it has sharp edges rather than curved edges like previous iPads, giving it a blockier look—it feels more like a book, or, yes, a folio, when you carry it. There’s something really pleasant about it.

Like, really pleasant. I find myself looking at the device from different angles. Turning it around in my hands. This thing, this combination of the iPad Air and the Smart Folio, is slipping unexpectedly in “perfect thing” territory. You know, like the Xbox One S. Or the Google Pixel 4a 5G, HP Spectre x360 14, and Xbox Series S.

This is rare and unusual. Most of the tools that I use are just that, tools, and there’s no real emotional attachment. (On Twitter, I literally just railed against the use of the word “beloved” to describe a software application because only people can be beloved. Lots of people didn’t understand my point, as is too common.) But there is something special about the iPad Air, especially when used with a Smart Folio. (I cannot imagine using this device without some kind of cover.)

Liking something because it looks good is … whatever. But it’s deeper than that, of course. I use an iPad every single day, for reading, and I’ve come to rely on it while traveling where my “right tool for the job” methodology kicks in, letting me preserve my laptop and its battery life purely for productivity work. The iPad Air is a great upgrade over the previous iPad I was using for the reasons noted above, and it is a much more attractive device, one I really enjoy holding. It’s … that perfect thing.

That’s cool, and I honestly wasn’t expecting that. That it came about after I was a bit flustered by not being able to get a Smart Cover is somewhat interesting to me, and maybe that enhances the effect. I just didn’t expect to like it this much.

But I do.