Apple’s iPad line defines tablets for most people. iPads are powerful, widely known, and simple; most schools and businesses understand and cater to iPad users. This year, the $599 iPad Air offers so much more than the $329 base iPad that it’s worth taking the step up if you can afford it. For the increase in price, you get a larger screen, stronger audio, faster networking, a much more powerful processor, better Apple Pencil support, and a superior build. That makes the fourth-generation iPad Air a good long-term investment and the best Apple tablet to buy in 2020. It also earns the iPad Air our Editors’ Choice award for high-end tablets.
I’m not going to spend this review explaining what an iPad is in general or going over the details of iPadOS—I encourage that you take a look at our full iPadOS review if you want details. Rather, I’d like to tell you why this iPad is the one you want.
A High-End Design
With its hard metal frame, the iPad Air looks and feels like an iPad Pro rather than the traditional rounded iPad. It’s almost the same size as the current 10.2-inch iPad, although it’s a touch slimmer and lighter. I remember the original Air was a revelation when it clocked in at one pound, and this model sticks to that weight.
The Air fits a 10.9-inch, 2,360-by-1,640 screen into the same body size as the 10.2-inch iPad by reducing the bezels. All iPads have 264ppi screens, so as they get larger, you just get more real estate; this screen, therefore, gives you just about as much surface area as the 11-inch iPad Pro. It’s laminated with an anti-reflective coating that makes it much less reflective, and more pleasantly usable, than the standard iPad’s screen; it also has Apple’s wide color gamut, which I’ve never really personally noticed.
The top and bottom of the tablet have powerful stereo speakers, which give real, two-channel stereo sound in landscape mode; on the lower-cost iPad, the speakers are only at the bottom. On the top of the tablet, there’s a really cool innovation in the form of a power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor. This means the Air doesn’t have to have a big bezel for a physical Home button, but it can also use a fingerprint sensor so you don’t have to futz around with trying to face-unlock the tablet when you’re wearing a mask.
Unleash the Power
The new iPad Air uses an Apple A14 processor with 4GB of RAM and either 64GB or 256GB of storage. It’s the fastest iPad available, and benchmarks faster than any Android device, as well.
Here are the numbers: Our iPad Air scored 639,962 on the Antutu benchmark; 595 on Basemark Web; 1,572 single-core and 3,931 multi-core on Geekbench 5; 108,481 on 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited; and 12,331 on Geekbench’s GPU Compute benchmark.
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That’s 20 percent higher on Geekbench Multicore and 22 percent better on web browsing than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, the most powerful Android device currently available. It’s 58 percent faster on Geekbench and 44 percent faster on Antutu than the base 2020 iPad. This is a super-fast chipset.
The 2020 models of the iPad Pro use an A12Z processor with eight CPU and eight graphics cores, as opposed to the A14’s six CPU and four graphics cores. Each of the A14 cores is better, but the A12Z has more of them, so comparing the Air to the Pro is a mixed bag.
The Air scored about the same on 3DMark as the Pro and scored 25 percent better on the Geekbench Compute benchmark, but got overpowered by sheer coreage on some of the other tests. The Pro scored 15 percent ahead of the Air on Antutu, and 16 percent better on Geekbench multi-core.
I don’t have a Surface Go 2 on hand for comparisons, but Geekbench’s browser says that the Intel Core m3 version scores up to 1605 in multi-core—less than half of what the A14 accomplishes.
All of these numbers mean absolutely impeccable performance on the iPad Air. No matter what I was doing, whether it was video chats, action games, or Apple Pencil-enabled art programs, it was smooth and responsive.
The one weak spot in this entire review is battery life: iPads have never been great at screen-on time in our tests. This one managed to stream YouTube for just 4 hours, 45 minutes before needing a charge, even shorter than previous models. I’m going to run another battery test to see if that holds up and will update this section with my results.
The Zoom Machine
The iPad Air has a 12-megapixel main camera, the same as the main camera on the iPad Pro, and a 7-megapixel front-facing camera, again the same as the front camera on the Pro. The main camera is a bit of an improvement over the base iPad’s 8-megapixel sensor—it records 4K video rather than 1080p, and has better HDR and low-light capabilities.
But the real news here—and one of the big reasons you want this tablet in 2020—is the front-facing camera. The low-cost iPad has a grainy 1.2-megapixel camera that’s better than a laptop webcam, but not by much. The iPad Air has a 7-megapixel front camera with much stronger low-light capabilities and makes you look infinitely better on Zoom calls.
There are two big reasons to choose the iPad Air over another tablet or laptop for a Zoom lifestyle, and one critical reason not to. The Air’s front-facing camera is far better than any laptop’s built-in camera, and it’s better than most consumer add-on webcams, too. It handles low light well and balances different lighting without making you hideously shiny. The Wi-Fi connectivity is excellent—certainly better than an older laptop—and if you get the LTE version, you have a backup connection.
The problem is that iPadOS still doesn’t multitask well. If you’re making a Zoom, Google, or web video call and open a second window, it shuts off your camera. So it’s impossible to follow a Zoom call and look like you’re paying attention while you’re really doing something else, which is critical for a lot of people. If you’re OK with the camera turning off, audio still works, so you can follow a lecture and still take notes. But that just won’t work for many meetings.
That puts the Surface Go 2, for example, ahead of the iPad Air simply because it can run two windows on an equal basis. That said, my daughter would shiv me if I made her give up her iPad for a Windows laptop. She has a Windows laptop to do Adobe Creative Suite work on, and every time she boots it up, she gets assaulted with complicated settings and update messages. While I definitely prefer the power of Windows, I can see the argument for the simplicity of iPadOS—provided you’re OK with this limitation.
Boosted Wi-Fi
The iPad Air comes in two networking models—a Wi-Fi-only base version and, as usual, a model with LTE added on for $130. This year’s iPads don’t support 5G, but 5G doesn’t make a big difference right now. Better Wi-Fi and 4G performance, on the other hand, does.
The Air uses the Wi-Fi and 4G chipsets from the iPad Pro line, which have significantly better performance than the one in the base iPad. The Air has Wi-Fi 6, which the base model doesn’t, but you don’t need a Wi-Fi 6 router to see the difference here.
Tested against a 500Mbps Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) connection, a weak 5GHz Wi-Fi signal gave us 136Mbps on the iPad Air (about the same as on the Pro and most flagship smartphones right now), but only 20.6Mbps on the base iPad. That’s a big difference. Note that you need to be using 5GHz Wi-Fi to see this difference, as the two tablets have about the same performance when ratcheted down to 2.4GHz-only mode.
The Air has better LTE and Bluetooth than the base iPad, as well. The Bluetooth support jumps from version 4.2 to version 5.0 for longer range. And LTE support adds bands 46 and 48, also known as LAA and CBRS. These are high-speed, in-city network bands that are used to give Wi-Fi or 5G-like speeds in inner-city areas.
Accessorizing the iPad Air
The iPad Air comes with a 20W USB-C power adapter and a charging cable. It works with accessories for the 11-inch iPad Pro, including Apple’s Magic Keyboard ($299) and Smart Keyboard Folio ($179), as well as third-party keyboards like the Logitech Slim Folio Pro ($119.99) and Logitech Folio Touch ($159). It also works with Bluetooth keyboards and mice, which is a much cheaper way to put together a virtual laptop; you can go with the Logitech K480 keyboard ($49.99), which has a groove for the tablet, plus an M350 mouse ($29.99), for instance.
If you’re going to use the Air as a primary laptop for school, you absolutely need a keyboard. The difference in text entry fluidity between using the on-screen keyboard and using a physical keyboard is huge. Just as much as the tactile feel of the keys helps, you get back all of the screen real estate that was being used for the on-screen keyboard.
Apple’s keyboards are excellent but very expensive. I actually prefer the Smart Keyboard Folio to the Magic Keyboard; the Magic Keyboard includes a trackpad, but it’s expensive and stiff. Having used both trackpad-enabled and non-trackpad-enabled iPad keyboards for a while, I take back my former insistence that trackpads really matter when working on an iPad; it doesn’t actually bother me to tap the screen.
The iPad Air also works with the $129, second-generation Apple Pencil stylus, which is notably superior to the first-generation Pencil compatible with the entry-level iPad.
The second-generation Pencil has a matte feel and, more importantly, isn’t completely round, so it doesn’t roll around in your hand and won’t roll off a table. It also attaches and charges on the side of your iPad magnetically, which makes it much harder to lose with several iPads kicking around the house.
The Air lacks the iPad Pro’s 120Hz ProMotion display with 240Hz touch sampling, and in lab tests, that does mean a less responsive stylus. But in real life, you don’t notice. I gave both the Air and the Pro to my wife, an artist and art teacher, and she couldn’t tell the difference in terms of responsiveness. Brushes in Procreate on the two devices do act a little differently, but we can’t say that one is better than the other.
Of course, the iPad Air can also be protected (and personalized) with a plethora of cases.
The iPad Air, Compared
I’ve spent most of this review comparing the Air only to the base model iPad. What about Android or Windows tablets, you might ask? The Air is priced similarly to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S7 and to the higher-end version of the Microsoft Surface Go 2. Yet you don’t hear a lot of people comparing the three devices side by side. Why is that?
In terms of the Tab S7, there just isn’t a big community or a lot of software support around Android tablets, unfortunately. That means powerful creative apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate are available for iPads and not for Android tablets. Video editing apps are definitely better on iPad. Most schools support the iPad by default, but not necessarily Android tablets. The Microsoft Office suite and Google’s cloud office suite are about the same on the two platforms, but unless you’re an all-Android household, it’s really hard to make an argument to get the Tab S7 over the better-supported iPad.
The argument around Windows machines is more complex. The iPad is faster, smoother, and more powerful—purely from a hardware perspective—than the Surface Go 2. It boots much more quickly, crashes less often, and is less prone to annoying malware. On the other hand, the Surface Go 2 can run two programs at once. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you can’t do a video call on the iPad while simultaneously editing a document, and if that’s a deal breaker feature for you, I get it.
The Best iPad for 2020
The iPad Air is the best value among Apple’s iPad lineup, and a slam-dunk for tablet of the year. The lower-cost iPad is still very good, mind you; I just think the upsell is worth it, especially because this is a tablet you’re going to be hanging onto for years. It’s not just about the A14 processor; the less-reflective display is a big improvement, the compatible Pencil is harder to lose, and the better Wi-Fi makes a major difference in daily performance. The iPad Air is also good enough that it’s impossible to justify the higher price of an iPad Pro. So if you can afford it, the iPad Air is the right model to buy now, as well as our Editors’ Choice winner for high-end tablets.
