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- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: What you need to know
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Price and competition
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Design and keyboard
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Display
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Performance
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Camera
- Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Verdict
- Nearly as fast as the iPad Pro
- Thin and light
- Decent camera
- Accessories are expensive
The 2020 iPad Air is, like most of Apples tablets, very firmly a productivity tool. When coupled with a keyboard, its a 2-in-1 laptop by another name, a machine you can do all your work on and more. And, despite lacking the Pro moniker its every bit the professional-level tablet its stablemates are.
There are differentiating factors, of course; Apple is always careful to ensure that. And there are tangible reasons why you might choose the more expensive iPad Pro over this, the fourth-generation iPad Air.
Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: What you need to know
Those reasons are principally camera related. The iPad Pro, for instance, has a LiDAR sensor where the iPad Air does not. This is intended to enhance the tablets depth-sensing capabilities, improving camera autofocus and enhancing AR (augmented reality) functionality. The iPad Air also lacks the Pros secondary ultrawide camera and isnt quite as powerful.
Not that the iPad Airs processor is sluggish. It uses the same processor that powers the latest generation of iPhones, the groundbreaking 5nm A14 Bionic. And, although it isnt quite a match for the A12Z, which has eight CPU and GPU cores, it is quicker than the previous generation iPad Pro (2018) by quite a margin.
The only other significant differences between the Air and the Pro are that the Air uses Apples new TouchID fingerprint reader, built into the power button on the tablets edge, instead of FaceID, and that it has a bog-standard 60Hz display where the Pros goes up to 120Hz.
Otherwise, the iPad Air looks uncannily like a cutback iPad Pro 11in. Its 10.9in display is a tiny bit smaller but not to the extent that youd notice. Its manufactured in the same style, with flat sides and rear and rounded corners, and its compatible with the same accessories too: the Apple Pencil 2 and new style Magic Keyboard.
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Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Price and competition
The principal attraction of the iPad Air is that, despite the similarities, its very much cheaper than the iPad Pro. At £579 (for the 64GB Wi-Fi only model), it is £190 less expensive than the 11-inch iPad Pro, though the latter does have twice as much storage at this price.
Alas, the accessories arent any cheaper. The tablet on its own might look reasonable but add the Magic Keyboard (£299) and Apple Pencil 2 (£119) and that price nearly doubles to £997. You can equip your Air with the cheaper Smart Keyboard Folio, cutting £120 off the total price, but thats still too much to spend on a keyboard cover in my view.
You can opt for more storage if you want, up to 256GB, and add 4G connectivity too, but this raises the price significantly. The most expensive iPad Air with both upgrades costs £859.
The only serious opposition in the Android camp comes from the 11in Samsung Galaxy Tab S7, which costs £619 for the cheapest Wi-Fi only model. For that price, it has double the storage of the base iPad Air and comes bundled with an S Pen stylus. Its official keyboard case is £189, bringing it in at £708 for the tablet, stylus and keyboard package.
Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Design and keyboard
Apple by now has mastered the art of designing attractive, well-made pieces of computing hardware and the iPad Air 4th generation doesnt stray from that path. Its a solid-feeling slab of aluminium and glass, and comes in five different colours: the familiar dark grey, silver and rose gold, plus two new and rather lovely shades of pastel blue and green.
Dimensions and weight are barely different from the iPad Pro 11-inch. The Air measures 179 x 6.1 x 248mm (W x D x H) and weighs 458g (460g for the cellular model) and its other physical characteristics are familiar as well. With the tablet mounted in the Magic Keyboard (landscape), the volume buttons and power button/fingerprint reader are located on the top left corner, the magnetic charging strip for the Apple Pencil 2 is on the top edge, the USB-C port is on the right edge and there are four speaker grilles on both the left and right edges. These output surprisingly full-bodied stereo audio, whether you keep the tablet in landscape or spin it around and hold it in portrait mode.
And, just as with the iPad Pro, there are three small contacts on the right side of the rear (again when viewed in landscape from the front) that provide the power and data connection for the Magic Keyboard and Smart Keyboard Folio cases.
Its a fantastic design and, when paired with that new Magic Keyboard it feels almost as comfortable to use as the larger 12.9in iPad Pro. The backlit keys have a decent amount of travel to them and a nice soft feel, and the layout feels a lot more spacious than youd expect it to.
Yes, some keys are reduced in width – the semicolon, apostrophe and backslash keys in particular – but the letter keys are all large enough to stave off typos when touch typing and I found it very easy to get up to speed on it.
The touchpad works just as nicely as it does on the iPad Pro tablets, with iOS 14s two- and three-fingered multitouch gestures simple to carry out, and the iPad Air also benefits from iOS 14s new Scribble feature. For owners of an Apple Pencil, this converts handwritten notes to text in a variety of situations across iOS, and in the iOS Notes app turns your wobbly hand-drawn shapes into crisp, geometric masterpieces. Alas the feature isnt supported across all apps yet it doesnt, for example, currently let you handwrite text directly into Google Docs.
The one slightly awkward dent in the iPad Airs appeal is, surprisingly, the new TouchID power button. This works absolutely fine and Ive had no recognition failures with it yet. However, its not always as easy to find as you might think. Depending on how you pick up the tablet, the reader might be in the top-left, top-right, bottom-left or bottom-right corner and that means you have to think about where to place your finger. FaceID on the iPad Pro, on the other hand, works instantly, whichever way around you hold the tablet.
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Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Display
Dig beneath the surface of the iPad Airs specifications and differences between it and the pricier Pro family of tablets starts to become more apparent. The display, for instance, is a similar size, resolution and pixel density (264ppi) to the 11in iPad Pro, but doesnt have the slick ProMotion refresh rate technology, which can run at up to 120Hz.
Instead, the iPad Airs screen is limited to 60Hz and, as a result, it doesnt quite feel as fluid under the finger and to the eye as the iPad Pro. Otherwise, theres nothing major amiss here. For your money, youre getting a wide-gamut display capable of reproducing the P3 colour space and one that supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision content.
In testing, it impressed us with its sRGB coverage and accuracy as well, reaching a peak brightness of 420cd/m² and a contrast ratio of 1,355:1, while colour accuracy within sRGB was excellent with a measured average Delta E of 1.16 and sRGB coverage of 95.1%.
In all, its an excellent screen, which is what weve come to expect from Apple over the years. It lacks the inky black and perfect contrast of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 and S7 Plus because its using IPS LCD technology instead of AMOLED but its still very, very good.
Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Performance
The six-core 5nm Apple A14 Bionic chip running affairs inside the iPad Airs chassis is the same as used inside the latest generation of iPhones. Its two CPU cores short of the iPad Pro (2020)s eight-core A12Z and its also short on GPU core-count with only four compared to the more expensive tablets eight.
That doesnt mean the iPad Air lacks speed or potency, however far from it. The new iPhones are the fastest on the planet and, since theyre effectively miniaturised computers, theres no reason the same silicon cant also perform well in a laptop or tablet like the iPad Air.
If you dont believe me, take a look at the graphs below, where Ive compared the iPad Air directly with not only the iPad Pro (2020) and Samsungs most recent Android tablets but also a selection of lightweight Windows 10 and MacOS laptops:
Youll see that the iPad Air 2020 only lags noticeably behind the iPad Pro: its single-core CPU performance is superior but multi-core and graphics performance are both slower. Otherwise, it is quicker than everything else on these graphs, including the cheapest Core i3 MacBook Air (2020), the Core i5 Samsung Galaxy Book Ion and the Core i7 Microsoft Surface Pro 7.
With raw performance this strong, no wonder Apple is planning to move its MacBooks to its own silicon over the next couple of years. Its just a shame that there still remain some fundamental roadblocks to using an iPad as a full-blown laptop replacement, not least the iPads restrictive external monitor support.
Battery life, meanwhile, is strong but nothing out of the ordinary. In our video rundown test, where we set the display to a brightness of 170cd/m2, disable auto-brightness and True Tone, and engage flight mode, the iPad Air lasted 9hrs 26mins, which is around the same as the iPad Pro 12.9in (2020) and an hour and a half short of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus.
Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Camera
The camera is pretty good, too, and if you ever find yourself with your iPad in hand instead of your smartphone, youll find it a competent companion. Theres no flash or secondary ultrawide camera as you get on the iPad Pro, and the results look a little less contrasty and softer in some circumstances. By and large, though, photographs captured with the 12MP f/1.8 camera look great:
Apple iPad Air 4 (2020) review: Verdict
Apple might not call this tablet an iPad Pro but the 4th-generation iPad Air is very much a tablet that deserves to be viewed in the same light, and mentioned in the same breath. Its a brilliantly usable productivity tablet and a highly capable laptop replacement, wrapped up in a slim, lightweight, attractive package.
Its performance is as good as, if not better, than some rival proper laptops and, critically, its very competitive on price.
In short, if you can live with the limitations of iPadOS over Windows 10 or MacOS, the iPad Air makes a brilliant laptop replacement and is certainly better value than the 11-inch iPad Pro.
