Is Apple's New iPad Air 4 ACTUALLY Worth $600?! 🤔 By Max Tech

Apple just announced the brand new iPad Air 4, and there's many reasons to buy one but there's also a few things that Apple conveniently left out which you definitely have to be aware of before ordering. These things will literally stop many of you from buying one and make the iPad Air 4 not worth it depending on what you do. I know at least a few of these will surprise all of you, as they surprised us when we figured them out. I Personally think that many people will be better off buying a used or refurbished 2018 iPad Pro for the same amount or possibly even less money, which i’ll leave some links to in the description, or spending the extra money and getting a lot more features with the 2020 iPad Pro. In this video, I’ll tell you not only what you'll be missing out on, but also what you’ll gain with the new iPad Air so that you can make an informed decision that you won’t regret in the future. On the outside the iPad Air 4 looks almost identical to the 2018 iPad Pro.

It's very slightly thicker but also lighter. The only visible difference to the trained eye is that the power button is larger and that's because it’s using Apple's new touch ID that is embedded into the power button. The only other external difference is that the screen is slightly smaller at 10.9 inches instead of 11” and the resolution dropped by just a few pixels to match. You won’t notice this the real world, and I feel like the only reason Apple did that is to separate it from the 11” iPad Pro. Its fully laminated with P3 wide color, true tone, and the same great anti-reflectivity coatings so almost everything is the same but there are 2 specific things that changed which are a dealbreaker for me, but let's stick to the positives before we get into the negatives.

Thankfully Apple didn’t ditch the quad stereo speakers which are a massive upgrade for playing games and watching movies Along with that it also takes on USB-C, support for the new Magic Keyboard which is overpriced but I still absolutely love, and now supports the Apple Pencil 2 which also means if you have the 1st gen Pencil, you’ll need to buy the new one. The camera on the back looks identical to the 2018 iPad Pro but for some reason Apple didn’t include the quad-led flash which is actually very handy for scanning documents. The front camera is still 7 megapixels but it’s missing True Depth sensors, so you won’t have access to memoji, Animoji, or the portrait lighting features. The other interesting omission of the five microphones that sounded great for facetime calls or if you need to record videos or voice notes, now there are only 2. Of course we’ll see how much of a difference we have between speakers, cameras, and mics in our hands on comparison against the iPad Pro, so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss that.

There's also a few things that it does better than the iPad Pro but since I started on the downsides already let's get into the biggest disappointments. First, lets start with the obvious one, No Face ID. Touch Id is fine but the face ID on the iPad Pro is soo convenient. From auto unlocking it by just pressing on the keyboard to logging into apps and using safari autofill without ever having to stop what I’m doing so touch ID is definitely a step back. The second is the lack of Promotion which is a shame.

Having that 120hz fluid display is one of the key features that really stands out on the iPad Pro’s. Not only does it make the ipad feel super smooth but it also allows the refresh rate to drop down to match your content, so if you’re watching a movie, it runs at 24fps which looks like the director intended and saves battery life at the same time. Promotion is also what makes the iPad Pro by par the best tablet to write or draw on, with latency so low that it's not even noticeable since the iPad Pro reads the pencils location 240 times per second. The iPad Air’s 60hz screen will have more than double the latency so basically the same performance as the iPad Pro from 2016. The common spec with the 2016 iPad Pro is the display brightness.

The 2017 iPad Pro and newer all support 600 nits of brightness which is 20% brighter than the new Air. Not only is that really handy in bright rooms or outdoors but it also enables HDR video which makes for a really nice viewing experience. With the new Air you’ll not only miss out on darker more detailed shadows with bright realistic highlights but will also use more power with the display refreshing more than twice as often as it needs to. Now comes the really weird part which I didn’t expect and that's the A14 bionics performance. We were surprised to see that Apple put the same processor that will come with the iPhone 12’s into this mid-spec tablet which will be the first ever 5nm processor on the market with 11.8 Billion transistors, that's about 40% more than before. Apple mentioned that it's 40% faster than the previous CPU and the graphics chip is 30% faster which is a really good improvement.

Once we heard the specs we figured the new iPad Air will have a few downsides but the having the new processor will make it a smart buy to future proof it, and it will perform better than the older Pro’s but actually that's not the case. Those performance improvements were based on the previous iPad Air, so we started to do the math ourselves. In Geekbench 5’s CPU test we should get a multi-core score of 4012 which is respectable obviously beating out the a12 in the previous iPad Air but looking deeper it's still about 15% slower than the iPad Pro from 2 years ago. Onto graphics, we should see a metal score of about 6000 which once again is a good improvement but its not only slower than the 2018 iPad pro as your probably expecting, which is over 50% faster, but even the 2017 10.5” iPad Pro looks to potentially be slightly faster and of course the 2020 is at the top with the A12Z. Now of course we don’t know what tests Apple was going off of and real world tests could be different which we’ll do a wide variety of tests once we get it so make sure to ring that notification bell.

So how in the world can two or three year old iPads which can be bought cheaper than the new Air be performing so well despite their much older processors? Well those use the X-series processors which are designed for tablets with more graphics and CPU cores. For example the new A14 bionic has a 6 core processor which has 4 high efficiency cores and 2 high performance cores while the A12X in the 2018 iPad Pro has an 8 core processor that doubles the high performance cores. The same thing goes for graphics with the a14 featuring 4 graphics cores instead of the 7 or 8 in the newer iPad Pro’s so that's how the old ones are actually still faster. With the 5nm design and less CPU and GPU cores we should also be seeing battery life improvements but for some reason Apple is still advertising the same 10 hours of battery life. I know that the lack of promotion has some effect but I guess we’ll have to do a real world battery life test when we get it in.

The new iPad air does have a few improvements over the 2018 iPad Pro like the new Rocolor options and Wi-Fi 6 but overall I’d much rather buy a used or refurbished 2018 iPad pro for a similar price and enjoy having HDR, a brighter display, having a flash for documents, a much smoother experience with Promotion display, smoother Apple pencil, the very convenient and quick face ID, and on top of that have faster CPU and much faster graphics performance for productivity and gaming. Now for those that don’t want to buy a used or refurbished iPad there's also the 2020 iPad Pro which also has wi-fi 6 but comes with more improvements at $150 to $200 more. For that extra cash you get all the benefits of the 2018 model but in a brand new device that also gets more and better cameras, lidar, faster cpu and GPU with potentially double the RAM and double the base storage which is the sweet spot for most people. If 64 isn’t enough on the Air you have to spend $150 more to get 256GB which makes it more expensive than a used 256GB Pro and only $50 away from a new 128GB Pro. Now that you know the full story It's going to be up to you to see if the iPad Air 4 is worth it or if all the extras that come with even the older iPad Pro make it a much better choice.. Let me know what you think and why.

I’ll leave links to all the models including refurb ones down in the video description along with links to this sweet ultra soft premium max tech shirt. Make sure to subscribe as we’ll be doing hands on comparisons as soon as we get it in, this has been max and I’ll see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech