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.

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.”

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