Apple iPad Air 13-inch (M4): price, specs & release date

Notebookcheck lab-tested · 2026-04-22

Display max brightness (X-Rite i1Pro 3): 625 cd/m² · Display average brightness: 612.6 cd/m² · Contrast: 1563:1 · Geekbench 6.7 single-core: 3700 points · Geekbench 6.7 multi-core: 13987 points · Battery WiFi web surfing runtime: 13h 23min · Battery load runtime (max brightness): 5h 04min · WiFi 7 receive throughput: 1791 MBit/s · Wild Life Extreme stress test stability (throttling): 72.5% · Max surface temperature under load: 38.8 °C · Speaker loudness: 76.4 dB

This is mainly due to the incredibly fast Apple M4: you don't get much more power even in a top-class tablet and the iPad Air is usually sufficient even for very demanding tasks.

In everyday use, you get absolutely smooth operation, only the 60 Hz screen is now noticeably outdated and creates a minimal but noticeable lag between input and response on the screen.

However, the SoC does throttle significantly after prolonged load and in some cases loses almost 40% of its performance.

TechRadar lab-tested · 2026-03-09

Geekbench 6 single-core: 3,745 · Geekbench 6 multi-core: 13,342

In everyday use the 13-inch iPad Air absolutely flies, whether you're juggling multiple windows in iPadOS 26, editing photos or videos, gaming, or pairing it with the Magic Keyboard to act as a laptop replacement.

As I wrote in 2025, the main miss here is a higher refresh rate. The 13-inch iPad Air still tops out at 60Hz, while Apple reserves the adaptive 120Hz ProMotion display for the iPad Pro lineup.

The M3 model was already very fast, so you won't see dramatic gains year over year, but if you're upgrading from an M1 Air, an entry-level iPad, or even an older iPad Pro, the improvement will be noticeable.