Performance Meets Poetry In The iPad Air M3

In 2011, noted British art critic Jonathon Jones shared some interesting feelings about the first-generation iPad model, launched in January 2010. “My feelings about this particular Apple creation are, to be honest, quite bonkers,” he wrote in The Guardian, adding: “I have never felt this way about a piece of machinery before. ‘Machinery’? That seems inappropriate, like calling Michelangelo’s David a hunk of stone.”

Thirteen years since, the iPad has undergone numerous changes, but this—the “profoundly humanist” aesthetic, as Jones describes it - remains the same. Simply put, the recently launched iPad Air M3 is a stunning piece of tech. The tablet is more powerful than ever, featuring the powerful M3 chip, which is built for Apple Intelligence and features Apple’s advanced graphics architecture with Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Compared to the M1 version, the new iPad Air has a CPU that is 35 per cent faster. When it comes to tasks like rendering, it beats the M1 version four times over. Its Neural Engine, I’m told, is 60 per cent quicker. And having tested one out for a month, I can attest to its speed of service and much-touted all-day battery life.

But this is not why the iPad Air M3 consistently (and almost exclusively) features in corp-core, tech-core, and academia-core Pinterest mood boards. It is essentially battery-powered art - delivered in two sizes (11 and 13 inches), four gorgeous finishes (blue, purple, starlight, space grey), and featuring a stunning Liquid Retina display. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Bono (yes, the Bono) shared that Steve Jobs, one of the finest minds to ever exist, had “an artist’s eye and ear”. “Steve was a very, very tough and tenacious guardian of the Apple brand, but the thing that endeared him to artists was his insistence that things had to be beautiful. He wasn’t going to make ugly things that made profits,” he added. This has been the cornerstone of the brand's philosophy: creating beautiful things that also deliver an incredible user experience.

You may also like: Apple iPhone 16e Review

The Magic Keyboard doesn’t just ensure that the iPad Air M3 is a convenient alternative to the larger MacBook, but adds to the aesthetic appeal with its sleek, portable design. The floating cantilever design smoothly adjusts to multiple viewing angles, and a large glass trackpad expands how you can work with iPadOS.

The tablet is a creative’s dream, honestly. A friend planned her entire wedding on Freeform, armed with only the Apple Pencil Pro and the 12 MP Wide back camera. Her board had everything from cocktail recipes for the reception to the budget for decor. The built-in Apple Intelligence enabled her to express herself in interesting ways. She was able to turn a sketch of an idea into a related image with Image Wand while creating new images based on descriptions and vague concepts. The 11-inch is, of course, convenient to carry and fit right into her purse, the battery life holding strong throughout the day regardless of the innumerable Zoom calls she was involved in.

The power of beauty simply cannot be negated. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote John Keats, emphasising the power of the aesthetic to provide solace in a harsh, brutal world. In the hands of the iPad user, the tablet stops being just a tool used to draft an email or make a deck - it almost becomes an extension of their personality. It makes them feel like the people they visualise when they look at their mood boards. “In our age, the power of the internet might seem to lead away from the physical, real, human world, into a dystopia of lost souls staring into screens. The real brilliance of Apple is to make digital culture human, and to keep it in the swim of life,” Jones wrote all those years ago. Holding the latest iPad iteration in my hand today, I see that each word he’s written still holds.