iPad Air 2020: The Real iPad Pro Killer! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here, okay, finally, a month after it was announced at that September event, the new iPad Air is finally here, and it turns out, if anything out, there is actually an iPad Pro killer. It's this. I mean I've talked at length about how the iPad Pro is. My favorite tablet by a mile right, you've seen the videos, and I've also talked about how other tablets might be better at the iPad Pro at like one thing like maybe a better overall display or a better speaker setup. But overall, the whole package for best tablet for me keeps going to iPad Pro. But the thing is most people don't need an iPad Pro and that thing still starts at 800 bucks, but now, with all the updates to this 4th gen iPad Air, there's almost no reason for people to go, spend that because this thing starts at 5.99, and it gets pretty much everything most people care about from the iPad Pro except one thing. So the new design of the iPad Air matches the iPad Pro in basically every way the boxy all-aluminum shape feels rock solid.

It's got these graspable flat sides. The buttons are in the same place. It's nice. It has the smart connector at the back, so you can drop it in a smart, folio or even a magic keyboard case. Just like an iPad Pro.

You want to know why? Because it is the magic keyboard case for the iPad Pro, and it just fits in the same case because it has the same dimensions. So, there's your trackpad there's your USB pass-through, because guess what iPad Air also now gets? USB type c see apple, it's okay to put USB in products without the pro in the name. It's good for everybody. The quad speaker setup that surrounds the display also sounds phenomenal for a tablet, and you have basically the exact same bezel thickness all the way around thin enough to not be a problem and still look good but thick enough to actually hold the iPad from any angle and not have accidental screen touches. But then one difference about that.

Bezel is inside it. You won't find face ID there's just a regular 7, megapixel front-facing camera up there and instead of face I'd touch. I'd is back, and it's built into that power button-up top, so kind of like pixel, 5, they've, technically gone backwards as far as biometric authentication methods goes, but in this world of masks that we live in uh fingerprint reader is just as convenient as face ID, sometimes more. So, although with an iPad, you use at home a lot where you're not really out and wearing a mask as much so maybe the fingerprint reader is just at the same level as face ID, either way, not a problem. It's pretty easy and quick to get used to.

Basically, the pro-tip is register multiple fingerprints. Actually, that's not even a pro-tip, that's just common sense, but a lot of people don't do it. But for me both index fingers work great, so no matter which orientation the iPad is in the finger. I press the power button with also unlocks it for me, so that's great and apple's done fingerprint readers well for a while. Now this one is also fast and accurate.

The only little of friction I had personally been I'm so used to iPad Pro that my unlock is typically touch to wake and then swipe up, and it reads my face. But of course I have to remember on this to touch the power button, which is such a minor thing, but also most people getting iPad Air aren't coming from an iPad Pro. So this is a total non-issue for on the back iPad. Air literally gets the same 12 megapixel primary camera as the iPad Pro, but you'll note it's just a single camera by itself and a mic. No flash, no ultra-wide, no LIDAR, but I mean, if you think about it, how often do you need an ultra-wide or a LIDAR sensor, or even a flash for your tablet? Photography I'd say pretty much.

Never so all of these things missing mean almost nothing to most people. I maintain that the most common use of iPad cameras should be document scanning and FaceTime calls, and these cameras here are more than good enough for that, and then the iPad Air has the new Apple Pencil support it snaps onto the side of the iPad to charge and pair the same way as the pro, so that's pretty sweet and then inside iPad Air actually has the even newer five nanometers a14 bionic chip instead of the a12z currently in the pro, so you can actually expect very similar, sometimes even better benchmark numbers on paper. But the point is, despite its slightly lower four gigs of ram, it's going to perform great. I've had no performance issues, and I don't expect the typical user will run into any performance limits for a long time. So, on the surface level, everything iPad Pro does iPad.

Air basically also does, except refresh rate, so iPad Air is, of course, at the standard, 60 hertz that we're used to on every other Apple device, except the ones with pro motion like iPad Pro, which are at 120 hertz. Now, if you've never seen 120 hertz, which, if we're being honest, most apple users, never have, then 60hz is gonna. Looks great, but it's like every time. I review an iPad. I always can't help but have these thoughts on like the state of tablets in general and how the entire android tablet ecosystem rose to such great heights and then fell so far like there used to be so much conjecture and thoughts and interesting videos about what the tablet OS should look like and how it should multitask and what it should do.

But now with like four out of the top five tablets available being iPads they're, all kind of just the same performance is fine, as expected through iPadOS 14, there's plenty of iPad optimized, apps and games, which is great, and it's just kind of the status quo. Now the iPad Pro is 120. Hertz, of course, speaks to people like me, because I'm personally, a fan of high refresh rate, the more pixels the better. But I've always said in the past, and it's still true here. Apple also makes some of the smoothest 60hz devices and smoothness, of course, is not a problem at all.

Here. It's standard, and actually battery life is also potentially even better on this iPad Air because it never has to hit 120 hertz, it's just chilling at 60, and it's using the more efficient 5 nanometer a14 chip. Also, it happens to come with a slightly faster 20 watt, fast charger in the box instead of the old 18 that comes with the iPad Pro. So, okay, I've done a lot of comparing in this video. So I'm just going to go ahead and name every single, significant thing that you could notice as a difference between iPad Pro and iPad Air, and I'm not going to get into like the extra 2 gigs of ram on the pro or the slightly higher peak brightness, I'm going to stick to the main real bullet points of why you'd pick one or the other.

So you should pick the iPad Pro over the air if you want the ultra-wide camera or LIDAR, if you want high refresh rate 120, hertz promotion or a bigger iPad, because the bigger 13-inch iPad Pro is available, the iPad Air only comes in the 11-inch size or 10.9 inch, but that's it for everyone else. You should get the iPad Air, it's its all the tablet. You need for way less money uh. That almost seems too simple. Are there any downsides? Yes, but they're small? Obviously, no bigger size is a bit of a downside for some people, like I mentioned, there's only 10.9 uh, but also I'm not a fan of these colors at all. They're all super pale pastels kind of colors, but I mean this green only shows up on camera as green, because I've made a conscious effort through this video to put it up against things that don't overwhelm the green.

It really isn't green most of the time, so I'd just get space gray. This new iPad to me more represents apple's, more interesting strategy of attacking a wider range of prices and offering more things at more prices. We saw it with the iPhone anywhere from 399 at the SC, all the way up to 1299 at the 12 pro max, and now we see it with the iPad with the 329 iPad straight all the way up to 14.99 for the one terabyte 13-inch iPad Pro with cellular. So this new iPad takes a lot of great stuff from the pro brings it down in price, and that's why you could call it an iPad Pro killer, but really it's just living alongside it for a lot of people. So that's pretty much it.

Let me know which one you would pick. Are you a promotion type of person like me? Would you go for the iPad Pro or are you one of those iPad Air people, because there's about to be a lot of them either way thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace?.

Source : Marques Brownlee