Apple Refreshes its 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Airs with M4 Chips

Apple’s mid-range iPad Air tablets are being refreshed today with faster M4 chips, the company’s new N1 networking chip, and in-house C1X modems on models with cellular connectivity. The new M4 iPad Air models also come with 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation, but it still starts with 128GB of storage, while the new iPhone 17e will ship with double the storage.

The M4 chip in the latest iPad Air models features an 8-core CPU and 9-core GPU (same number of cores as the M3), but Apple claims it’s up to 30 percent faster than its previous generation chip, and up to 2.3x faster than the iPad Air with M1. The 9-core GPU of M4 also supports second-generation hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, and there’s now 12GB of unified memory (up 50%), with memory bandwidth increased to 120GB/s.

“iPad Air gives users more ways than ever to be creative and productive, offering powerful performance and incredible versatility to help them turn their ideas into reality,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With its blazing performance thanks to M4, incredible AI capabilities, and game-changing iPadOS 26 features, there’s never been a better time to choose or upgrade to iPad Air.”

Thanks to Apple’s N1 wireless chip, the M4 iPad Airs now support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and users can expect better performance when connected to 5GHz Wi-Fi networks and improved reliability of Personal Hotspot and AirDrop. The company’s C1X modem on cellular models also offers up to 50 percent faster cellular data performance. However, battery life is identical compared to M3 models, with up to 10 hours of web surfing on Wi-Fi and up to 9 hours when using cellular data.

The rest of the specs of the M4 iPad Air didn’t change: Apple kept the same 12MP wide camera on the back, the same 12MP Center Stage sensor on the front, and the Liquid Retina display is also identical. The latest iPad Airs also still support the Apple Pencil Pro and the Magic Keyboard for iPad Air, which are available for purchase separately.

The M4 iPad Airs are available for pre-order starting Wednesday, March 4, and they will start shipping on March 11 alongside the new iPhone 17e. The 11-inch model still starts at $599, while the 13-inch model is priced at $799. The cellular versions start at $749 and $949, respectively.