Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s ‘Most Powerful and Versatile iPad Air Ever’

Apple’s ‘Peek Performance’ event for March has been and gone and with it comes a new slate of shiny objects for tech fans to obsess over. One of the products folks were most keen to hear about this time around was the iPad Air for 2022.

Rumours of a new generation of iPad Air have been floating around for some time now, and as of March 9, they were confirmed. Apple revealed what it describes as its “most powerful and versatile iPad Air ever”.

Here’s what you can expect from the 2022 iPad Air

iPad Air 2022 speed and performance

The 2022 model if iPad Air puts the M1 chip to use – the same chip we see used in iPad Pro and Apple Macbooks -boasting a considerable performance boost. According to Apple, the latest iPad Air is able to offer 60 per cent faster performance and 2x faster graphics performance than previous Air models due to 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU.

In essence, the introduction of the M1 chip here will see users able to work through multiple apps, from editing to streaming and gaming, with a little more ease. This ability, Apple has announced, is combined with an all-day battery life.

And with 5G capability, the new Air boasts peak speeds of up to 3.5 Gbps.

The 2022 iPad Air also runs on iPadOS 15, just like the 9th gen iPad and iPad Mini.

Camera and display

Those familiar with the 9th generation iPad suite will have come across Centre Stage before. The nifty feature, which automatically pans the front camera to centre you in frame when holding a video call, has now also arrived for iPad Air 2022.

The Ultra Wide 12MP front camera is comparable to that of the 9th gen iPad Mini, and for the back we’ve got a 12MP Wide camera with 4K video capability.

Moving over to the screen itself, we’ve got a 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with 3.8 million pixels boasting 500 nits of brightness, full lamination, a P3 wide colour gamut, True Tone (again something we were introduced to with the 9th gen iPad and iPad Mini) and an antireflective screen coating.

For those keen to see how this model holds up as a streaming device, the Air has landscape stereo speakers that according to Apple, offer wide stereo sound perfect for a movie-viewing experience.

iPad Air 2022 design and accessories

Now onto aesthetics. The iPad Air for 2022 comes in a range of five colours: space grey, starlight, pink, purple,  and a new blue shade.

When it comes to connectivity, Apple has announced the USB-C port is twice as fast as the previous Air model with data transfers up to 10 Gbps. The port can be used to connect your iPad Air to cameras, external storage, and displays with up to 6K resolution.

And in the accessories space, the 2022 iPad Air is compatible with both the Apple Pencil (2nd generation) for all your doodling needs, Magic Keyboard or Smart Keyboard Folio if you prefer a more traditional typing experience and colour-matching Smart Folio covers, too.

Pricing and Australian release date

If you’re keen to get your hands on the latest iPad Air model, we should probably talk numbers, yeah?

Wi-Fi models of iPad Air are available with a starting price of $929 and Wi-Fi + Cellular models start at $1,159. The devices are available in 64GB and 256GB configurations. For comparison’s sake, the 9th generation iPad is priced from $499 and the Mini starts from $749.

It’s worth noting there is also education pricing available for the iPad Air (for university students and their parents, faculty, staff and homeschool teachers in all disciplines) prices here start from $849.

The 2022 iPad Air models are available to pre order in Australia from Saturday, March 12 and items will begin landing in hands from March 18, 2022.