Apple recently took the stage to unveil the 6th Gen iPad Air. This new tablet models arrive with various enhancements over their predecessors. But is it actually a worthy upgrade over the iPad Air 5th Gen? Let’s find out in this comparison.

iPad Air 6th Gen
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1. iPad Air 6th Gen vs iPad Air 5th Gen: Bigger & Better?

One of the biggest updates to the iPad Air series is a larger screen. Apart from the standard 10.9-inch version, a new 13-inch model has also been announced for the first time. Both the new 6th Gen variants sport Liquid Retina IPS LCD panels, with the larger one offering 2732×2048 pixels and 600 nits peak brightness. This is brighter and taller than the 10.9-inch display with 500 nits of brightness found on the iPad Air 5th Gen.

2. Design gets a slight refresh

A couple of underrated updates to the iPad Air 6th Gen were with its design. While there are no major overhauls in its form factor, there are some changes that could fall under ‘quality of life improvements’. The newest iPad Air now houses a front facing camera, which is landscape oriented. This means that it is no longer at the top. Similarly, even the stereo speakers follow a landscape placement and support spatial audio.

3. 50% More Faster Chip

The M1 was a powerful first gen proprietary chip from Apple. However, it has since its announcement a few years back. But the M2 is still a capable processor that promises to offer 50% faster performance than its predecessor. This is one of the biggest upgrades between the latest and previous gen iPad Air tablets. The new chip also powers AI features as well. Thanks to its 16-core Neural Engine, you get access to Visual Look Up, Subject Lift, Live Text, and more.

4. Double the base storage

A small point of contention with the base iPad Air has always been the limited storage. The 5th Gen model started with just 64GB of storage, but this has now been doubled. So the iPad Air 6th Gen comes with 128GB memory. This is highly welcomed since there is no unnecessary price bump between the two generations either.

5. What else is new?

Apart from these, there are various other slight enhancements to the successor of 2022’s iPad Air model. It supports Apple Pencil 2 and even Apple Pencil Pro. The Bluetooth standard is now a more common Bluetooth 5.3 over Bluetooth 5.0. The iPad Air 6th Gen runs on the iPadOS 17.4 out of the box, so longer software support is a given. The base storage did get an upgrade but the top end models have quadrupled in capacity. While the 256GB was the top model two years ago, the latest iPad Air comes with 512GB and 1TB variants as well.

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