Apple snuck the M4 chip into its mid-range tablet this week without adding a cent to the bill — $599 for the 11-inch, $799 for the 13-inch. Want one? Pre-orders go up March 4, it ships March 11. Students get a slightly better deal — $549 and $749 respectively through Apple’s education pricing.
Same price, bigger chip
Nine GPU cores instead of eight, RAM up from 8GB to 12GB, bandwidth at 120GB/s. Apple puts the performance gain at 30% over the M3, which tracks — more memory tends to do that. For M1 users the jump is harder to ignore: 2.3x faster across the board, four times quicker on ray-traced 3D graphics, and a Neural Engine that’s three times faster.
That last bit matters more than it used to, since iPadOS is leaning heavily on on-device AI through Apple Intelligence — transcribing notes, rewriting emails, digging through photos. The M4 handles all of it without pinging a server.
The Air also gets Apple’s N1 wireless chip this time around, which brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. Cellular models pick up the C1X modem — 50% faster than what the M3 Air had, and 30% lighter on battery drain.
The 12MP Center Stage camera sits along the landscape edge, which makes a real difference if the iPad lives in a stand or paired with the new Magic Keyboard.
New keyboard, same pencil
That keyboard now comes with a 14-key function row, handling brightness, volume and the rest without diving into software. Apple Pencil Pro works with it too. Four colors — blue, purple, starlight, space gray — and storage from 128GB to 1TB.
Then there’s iPadOS 26, which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The interface has been rebuilt around something Apple calls Liquid Glass — a translucent material that shifts based on what’s behind it.
More practically, there’s a proper windowing system now, letting users stack and switch between apps in a way that finally feels closer to a desktop. A new menu bar, an overhauled Files app, and a native Preview app round things out. For longtime iPad users, it’s the biggest software leap in years.
How Apple held the price
Keeping the price flat while bumping RAM by 50% is harder than it looks right now. Memory costs have been all over the place, and most device makers have quietly passed those costs on.
Apple hasn’t, and that comes down to a few things — the sheer volume it buys gives it leverage most suppliers won’t push back on, and its deals tend to be locked in well ahead of when prices spike.
The 3nm process M4 runs on is also cheaper per transistor than what came before, which frees up margin elsewhere. Put together, it’s enough to eat the memory cost without touching the sticker price.