Apple’s latest iPad Air refresh has started appearing in early benchmarks, and the numbers suggest the tablet performs closer to the iPad Pro than many might have expected. Shortly after the announcement, the first Geekbench 6 results for the M4-powered iPad Air began circulating online. In the test, the tablet scored 3,714 in single-core and 12,296 in multi-core performance.
Those numbers put it surprisingly close to the Apple iPad Pro (M4), which typically lands around 3,691 single-core and 13,663 multi-core in the same benchmark. In other words, single-threaded performance is nearly identical, while the Air trails the Pro by roughly 10% in multi-core workloads.
That gap isn’t particularly surprising once you look at the chip configurations. The iPad Air uses an 8-core version of the M4, with three performance cores and five efficiency cores. The iPad Pro, meanwhile, carries a 10-core variant with four performance cores and six efficiency cores.
The extra cores in the Pro help when software can scale across many threads — things like exporting large video projects or heavy multitasking. But for everyday work, the difference may be harder to notice. Tasks like browsing, media consumption, note-taking, and even most creative workloads rarely saturate all available cores.
That positioning keeps the Air noticeably cheaper than the Pro lineup, while still delivering Apple’s newest silicon. If these early benchmarks hold up in broader testing, the M4 iPad Air may end up occupying a sweet spot in Apple’s tablet lineup — offering most of the performance of the Pro models without the same price tag. For many buyers, the extra cores in the Pro simply won’t make a meaningful difference in daily use.
The M4 iPad Air is already available for pre-orders, with retail availability reportedly scheduled for March 11. Pricing starts at about 4,799 yuan in China (roughly $659) for the 11-inch model with 128GB storage, while the 13-inch version begins around 6,499 yuan (~$899). Pricing and availability may vary by region.
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(Source: Geekbench)
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