It is clear at first glance that the latest iPad Air M2 is essentially an upgrade that replaces the core. There are minimal improvements in features, which are mostly related to the M2, such as support for ProRes hardware acceleration. Perhaps the Apple Pencil hover feature is relatively independent and can be considered an improvement not brought by the chip.
So here you can make a basic conclusion that choosing between the new and old models of iPad Air is essentially a choice between the M1 and M2. The improvement of M2 compared to M1 is actually quite significant, not something that can be summarized with a casual remark like “M2 improvement is general.”
If you really focus on improving chip performance, then M2 is still worthy of priority. At least in my opinion, it’s worth adding four to five hundred yuan to the budget for this thing.
Here’s a brief understanding of what M2 has improved:
Obviously, the improvement of M2 is still very powerful. On the basis of the absolute high performance of the M1, it is already amazing that it can be further improved! What’s more, the M2 can increase the CPU by 18%, the GPU by 35%, and the NPU by 44%. The memory controller also provides memory bandwidth of up to 100GB/s. It even adds the ProRes codec engine, which is very useful for video editing and other tasks. Huge improvement.
These boosts themselves are definitely huge, but whether they are useful or not will vary from person to person! To be honest, based on a tool like iPad Air and the real use of most people, the actual role of M2 is far less beautiful than that of data.
To put it extremely, if most users do blind box tests with iPad Air M1 and iPad Air M2, there is a high probability that they will not be able to find out which one is M2. In fact, when the iPad Pro M2 was first launched, many people were playing with the iPad Pro M2 in the experience store, but they were asking the clerk where the new iPad Pro was!
So as said at the beginning, this upgrade of iPad Air is essentially an improvement in chip performance. Performance improvement mainly has two functions. One is to deal with the very small number of users who really need extreme performance. There is no way out. Some people need stronger performance, or some people need a video decoder with higher bandwidth that can support 8K H.264 and HEVC video, which is someone who needs to support a ProRes video engine that plays multiple 4K or 8K video streams at the same time. For this group of users, the pursuit of performance is endless.
Moreover, there is also a group of people who can actually benefit greatly from performance improvements, and that is some people who bought iPad Airs and plan to use them for a long time. The question is, how long is considered long? In the years I have been using MacBook Air M1 and iPad M1, I actually haven’t touched the performance bottleneck of M1 in regular use.
However, one point needs to be emphasized: the performance mentioned here is based on mobile devices such as iPad and MacBook. If you want to compete with absolute performance, desktop computers with higher power consumption can easily dominate!
But no matter what, the iPad and MacBook supported by the M1 will not have any performance anxiety for at least the next five years. Especially the iPad. In fact, even the iPad Pro A12X released in 2018 is still available for another two or three years today. But in fact, compared with the A12X, the performance improvement of the M1 is more than 50%!
What about M2? Compared with the M1, the CPU is increased by 18%, the GPU is increased by 35%, and the NPU is increased by 44%. With so much overflow performance, it will definitely not be a problem to use it for two or three years longer than the M1. Of course, the more critical factor is still that the overall hardware of the iPad Air itself is really strong enough! Sometimes I can’t help but fall into deep thought while holding the iPad Air. If I could not use the ProMotion adaptive refresh rate and more extreme screen that iPad Pro said, what else could the iPad Air improve?
However, I still don’t recommend over-thinking the life of the iPad. Anything will become tired after using it for a long time. Digital products, on the other hand, can always accumulate some attractive new features after a span of three to five years. Therefore, for the performance improvement of M2, my personal suggestion is that the price difference is not large, so it is not in vain. Either there is a higher performance demand right now, which is essentially a necessity and there is no room for negotiation.
As far as products are concerned, the iPad Air M2 is currently recommended for the 11-inch version. The price advantage of the M1 version is not obvious, and the iPad Air also provides a dessert specification of 128GB!