Apple has unveiled its new iPad Air with a powerful M3 system-on-a-chip, which will land in stores nationwide tomorrow (March 12, 2025). It arrives with a choice of 11" or 13" screen sizes and four colours — Blue, Purple, Starlight, and Space Grey. These are the same as the M2-powered version of the iPad Air, launched last year.
Another similarity with the previous model? The price. Yes, the more powerful iPad Air arrives with the same starting price of £599 for the 11" model, rising to £799 for the 13" model.
Speaking about the refresh to the iPad Air, Apple Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, Bob Borchers said: "iPad Air is so popular because of its unmatched combination of powerful performance, portability, and support for advanced accessories, all at an affordable price. For everyone from college students taking notes with Apple Pencil Pro, to travellers and content creators who need powerful productivity on the go, iPad Air with M3, Apple Intelligence, and the new Magic Keyboard take versatility and value to the next level."
The biggest new addition to the iPad Air is the M3 system-on-a-chip — that's the same silicon found inside the MacBook Air launched last year. This laptop-grade chipset delivers some serious grunt to the iPad, with Apple boasting almost 2x faster performance compared to the M1-powered iPad Air.
Graphics performance sees even greater gains, thanks to the 9-core GPU built into the M3 system-on-a-chip. That unlocks 40% faster performance during graphics-intensive rendering workflows. It also enables accurate lighting, reflections, and shadows for a realistic gaming experience.
Apple's M3 system-on-a-chip was previously used to power MacBook Air — and now features in the £599 iPad Air to enable faster multi-tasking, better AI performance, and plenty of battery life
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The improvements to the Neural Engine built into the M3 chipset, which is dedicated to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tasks, means the new iPad Air can handle the latest Apple Intelligence features with aplomb. Compared to M1, the Neural Engine in M3 is up to 60% faster for AI-based workloads.
Apple Intelligence brings features like Writing Tools, which can proof-read your emails, documents and text messages. It can also rewrite your text to adjust the tone or length. You can also ask Apple Intelligence to transform your writing into a poem, or leverage ChatGPT to add new paragraphs with additional information gathered from across the web.
Apple Intelligence can also summarise lengthy email threads, PDFs, and webpages into a brief description or bullet points to get you back up to speed. Likewise, unread notifications will also be recapped by the AI too.
Image Wand is one of the new features included with Apple Intelligence. It lets you sketch a rough doodle in the Notes app, circle it, and use AI to enhance your drawing in a number of styles
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Siri can now answer thousands of questions about your new iPad Air, offering step-by-step instructions for common requests without searching the internet. You can also type queries to Siri if you're somewhere that barking orders to the hands-free AI assistant could be awkward.
Image Wand, a new feature baked into the Notes app, can transform your rough sketches into polished images simply by drawing a circle around your hand-drawn image using an Apple Pencil.
In Photos, the Clean Up tool removes distracting people or objects from shots, while natural language search lets you trawl your entire library for photos or clips within longer videos by describing what you're looking for.
You can also generate your own Memory Movie by describing the people, location, tone, and other elements that you'd like to feature in the final cut — and Apple Intelligence will scan through your library and do the rest.
Genmoji lets you generate never-before-seen emoji characters based on a brief written prompt. These can be used across iPadOS, including iMessage, email, or documents. Likewise, Image Playground is a new app that allows you to tap-into Apple Intelligence to combine concepts, text descriptions, and people from your photo library to create stylised images within seconds.
The new Magic Keyboard for iPad Air starts from £269 and arrives with a fully-featured row of Function keys — like you'd fine on a MacBook — USB-C for charging the iPad, and a larger trackpad
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Apple Pencil Pro (£129) and Apple Pencil (USB-C) (£79) are both compatible with the new iPad Air. Coinciding with the launch of the new iPad Air, Apple has released a new version of its Magic Keyboard accessory, which now boasts a larger built-in trackpad and a 14-key function row for easy access to controls.
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It snaps to the back of the iPad Air with magnets and connects via the Smart Connector with no need to worry about the hassle of Bluetooth pairing. The keyboard includes its own USB-C connector for charging and maintains the popular floating design that debuted on the accessory for the iPad Pro.
The refreshed accessory starts from £269 for the 11" model and £299 for the 13" model.
The new iPad Air and its Magic Keyboard accessory are available for pre-order now, with both shipping March 12.
