Apple quietly dropped the M4 chip into its mid-range iPad without raising the price. The 11-inch still costs $599, and the 13-inch runs $799, the same as before.
Pre-orders open March 4, and units ship March 11. If you’re a student, you get it a bit cheaper: $549 for the 11-inch and $749 for the 13-inch through Apple’s education store.
iPad Air M4 Price and Chip
The M4 in the new iPad Air comes with nine GPU cores up from eight, 12GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and 120GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple says it’s 30% faster than the M3, which makes sense given the memory bump.
If you’re coming from an M1 iPad, the difference is bigger. You get 2.3x better overall performance, ray-traced 3D graphics that run four times faster, and a Neural Engine that’s three times quicker.
That Neural Engine speed matters now more than it did a year ago, because iPadOS leans on it heavily for Apple Intelligence features like transcribing notes, rewriting emails, and searching through your photos. All of that runs on the device itself, no internet connection needed.
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The Air also gets Apple’s N1 wireless chip this time, which adds Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support. If you go with a cellular model, you get the C1X modem, which is 50% faster than the previous version and pulls 30% less power from the battery.
The 12MP front camera is positioned on the landscape edge this time, not the portrait edge. If you use your iPad in a stand or with the Magic Keyboard, the camera now faces you the way it should during video calls instead of sitting off to the side.
iPad Air M4 Keyboard and Touch Pen
The new Magic Keyboard adds a 14-key function row, so you can adjust brightness, volume, and other settings directly from physical keys without touching the screen. It works with the Apple Pencil Pro and comes in four colors, which are blue, purple, starlight, and space gray. Storage options run from 128GB up to 1TB.
iPadOS 26 is a good deal more than the hardware in some ways. Apple rebuilt the interface around what it calls Liquid Glass, a translucent design layer that changes appearance depending on what’s on screen behind it.
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More useful than the visuals is the new windowing system. You can now stack and switch between apps in a way that actually feels practical, closer to how a laptop handles multitasking.
Apple also added a menu bar, updated the Files app, and brought a native Preview app to iPad for the first time. For anyone who has used an iPad for years, this is the most significant software update the platform has seen in a long time.
iPad Air M4 Price
Apple holding the price steady while adding 50% more RAM is not easy, especially right now that the memory prices have been volatile, and most companies have quietly raised prices to cover the difference.
Apple didn’t increase the price of the Air because they buy chips and components in volumes that most suppliers can’t afford to walk away from. This helps them lock in pricing contracts well before market rates climb up. That buying power gives Apple a cushion most other device makers don’t have.
The M4 also runs on a 3nm manufacturing process, which costs less per transistor than older processes. That efficiency saves money on the chip itself, which gives Apple room to absorb the higher memory cost without passing it on to you at checkout.
