iPad Air 4 review: Apple’s sleek and portable tablet is powerful enough to rival the iPad Pro

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Unveiled in September 2020, the redesigned iPad Air is essentially an iPad Pro with some of the settings dialled down.

It has the same sharp-edged design, and an all-screen front unsullied by anything as unsightly as a home button. Unlike the iPad Pro it doesn’t have Face ID, but it does have Touch ID built into the power button. It supports the second-generation Apple Pencil as well as the magic keyboard and smart keyboard.

The iPad Air 4 is more expensive than in previous years, but still considerably cheaper than the iPad Pro has ever been. This makes it the iPad Pro’s closest rival, and a credible alternative for anyone looking for a mid-range tablet with top-class features.

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Apple is rumoured to be on the cusp of announcing an updated range of iPads later this year, though it’s not confirmed that we’ll see the iPad Air 5 any time soon. The future update to the iPad Air range is rumoured to have an updated OLED screen, but this is speculation right now – the next model might not even appear until 2022.

We’re still less than a year into the iPad Air 4’s lifespan, so there’s plenty of life left in this versatile, portable and powerful slate. Here’s our review.

We’ve been testing the iPad Air 4 since launch, using the tablet for everything from video conferencing with colleagues to playing games, watching movies and TV shows on the go, and reading news stories and books in bed.

The newest iPad Air launched at the end of 2020 and introduced a whole suite of upgrades to Apple’s lightest tablet.

The update refined what was an already great device, with many of the most notable improvements to the iPad Air filtering down from the class-leading iPad Pro. This means previously premium features such as an all-screen display and magic keyboard compatibility on a mid-priced iPad costing £579.

Whereas previous models followed the design of the entry-level iPad, the 2020 iPad Air closely resembles the newest iPad Pro. It ditches its rounded curves in favour of sharper, flatter-edges: the neat, faintly industrial aesthetic reintroduced by the iPhone 12 range. The 2020 iPad Air feels premium down the very last millimetre, with precisely machined speaker grilles and physical volume buttons positioned to within microscopic tolerances.

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It’s a delight to hold, and deceptively light and tough. The 2020 iPad Air is also available in a wider and more creative range of colours than ever before, which is great news for those who prefer a bit more personality in their tablet.

Like the iPad Pro, the 2020 iPad Air has an all-screen design, meaning there’s no home button on the front of the tablet and the bezels are uniformly sized around the edge of the display. These bezels are thinner than before, but still very apparent – they’re about as thin as those found on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Plus, but because this is a smaller tablet overall the bezels appear to take up a larger portion of the front of the device.

The display itself is luscious and automatically adapts to the ambient light of the room you’re in to produce even colour tones and consistent white balance. The refresh rate is significantly lower than that of the latest iPad Pro, but if you’ve never laid eyes on the impressive, silky smooth scrolling of the most powerful iPad, you won’t recognise any shortcoming here. It’s a beautiful display.

Powered by the A14 chip, which is also found inside the iPhone 12 range, the iPad Air feels super speedy to navigate around and can happily handle processor-intensive apps and multitasking. Because it’s compatible with the Apple Pencil and magic keyboard – or the more affordable smart keyboard accessory – this makes the 2020 iPad Air a credible alternative to lugging your laptop around, so long as you’re able to use iOS apps rather than a more versatile and full-featured operating system.

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Starting at just 64GB, storage on the iPad Air is limited compared to the giant capacity of the iPad Pro, but it’s convenient enough to complement this local storage with cloud storage to extend your available space. Battery life is excellent too, lasting a full day with heavy usage. The front-facing camera isn’t as sharp as the one found on the iPad Pro, but it’s more than good enough for video conferencing and FaceTime.

Other simple touches round off what is, in our estimation, the best iPad for most shoppers. Touch ID is built into the power button. Regardless of which way up you hold the iPad, the lock screen will subtly indicate the location of this button, meaning you don’t have to search around the edge of the iPad with your fingers to turn the thing on. It’s a tiny detail, saving just a fraction of a second, but typical of Apple’s intelligent approach to usability.

The latest iPad Air repositions itself as the unofficial iPad Pro lite, and the move makes a whole heap of sense. This is a stunning little device that swipes some of the very best features from the most powerful iPad, so much so that it presents a legitimate threat to Apple’s leading tablet.

It’s more expensive than in previous years, but if you don’t need the top-end components and specs of the high-performance iPad Pro, the iPad Air is the best Apple tablet you can buy right now.