Apple today introduced the new iPad Air with the Apple-designed M1 chip, delivering a massive leap in performance.

Available in a new array of colours, iPad Air also features the new Ultra Wide front camera with Centre Stage for a more natural video conferencing experience, a USB-C port with up to 2x faster transfer speeds and blazing-fast 5G on cellular models, at an affordable price.

Advanced cameras and compatibility with the latest accessories enable users, including content creators, gamers and students, to push the boundaries of creativity, productivity and self-expression.

“Whether it’s a college student taking elaborate notes, a content creator working on their latest project or a gamer playing graphics-intensive titles, users love iPad Air for its amazing performance and versatility in such a portable design,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With the breakthrough M1 chip, Ultra Wide front camera with Centre Stage and ultrafast 5G, iPad Air is now more powerful, more capable and simply more fun than ever.”

The breakthrough M1 chip in iPad Air delivers a giant performance boost to even the most demanding apps and workflows, with incredible power efficiency and all-day battery life.

The 8-core CPU delivers up to 60 per cent faster performance, and the 8-core GPU delivers up to 2x faster graphics performance compared to the previous iPad Air. Combined with the CPU and GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine powers advanced machine learning (ML) functions that enable next-level experiences. From editing multiple streams of 4K video, to playing graphics-intensive games, redesigning a room in 3D and more realistic augmented reality (AR), the performance of M1 enables users to do more than ever with iPad Air.

The Ultra Wide 12MP front camera with Centre Stage automatically pans to keep users in view as they move around. When others join in, the camera detects them too, and smoothly zooms out to include them in the conversation. So whether catching up with loved ones or learning remotely, Centre Stage makes connecting more engaging than ever. With the addition of Centre Stage to iPad Air, all iPad models now feature this magical experience.

The 12MP Wide camera on the back of iPad Air lets users capture sharp photos and 4K video, scan documents and enjoy amazing AR experiences. An end-to-end solution for photo and video capture, editing and sharing, iPad Air is an incredibly versatile and ultraportable mobile studio.

Customers can do even more on iPad Air with faster wireless connectivity on the go. With 5G, iPad Air can reach peak speeds of up to 3.5 Gbps in ideal conditions.

With eSIM and Wi-Fi 6 support, iPad Air offers greater flexibility when users need to get connected, from accessing files, to backing up data, communicating with colleagues, or enjoying a movie with family and friends using SharePlay.

The USB-C port is now up to 2x faster than the previous generation, with data transfers up to 10 Gbps, so importing large photos and videos is even quicker. The port connects iPad Air to a vast ecosystem of USB-C accessories, including cameras, external storage, and displays with up to 6K resolution.

Loved for its thin and light design, the new iPad Air comes in a gorgeous array of colours: space grey, starlight, pink, purple and a stunning new blue.

iPad Air features a 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display for an immersive visual experience, with 3.8 million pixels and advanced technologies, including 500 nits of brightness, full lamination, a P3 wide colour gamut, True Tone and an antireflective screen coating.

Combined with the Liquid Retina display, landscape stereo speakers in iPad Air deliver wide stereo sound for a great movie-viewing experience. Touch ID is built into the top button of iPad Air, delivering the same ease of use and secure authentication users know and love to unlock iPad Air, log in to apps or use Apple Pay.

Apple Pencil (2nd generation) turns iPad Air into a digital journal and sketchbook users can take anywhere. With wireless charging and pairing, Apple Pencil delivers pixel-perfect precision and imperceptible lag, making writing as easy and natural as using pen and paper.

The new iPad Air is compatible with Magic Keyboard, providing the best typing experience with its floating design and built-in trackpad; Smart Keyboard Folio, with its comfortable typing experience in a slim design; and Smart Folio covers, which come in beautiful coordinating colours, black, white, electric orange, dark cherry, English lavender and marine blue, that complement the new iPad Air finishes.

iPadOS 15 delivers an experience that is designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of iPad.

• Multitasking is even more intuitive, making features like Split View and Slide Over easier to discover, easier to use and more powerful.
• Notes goes system-wide with Quick Note, and offers new ways to collaborate and organise, whether typing or writing with Apple Pencil.
• SharePlay makes it possible for friends and family to share experiences while on a FaceTime call. Whether users are hosting a viewing party, listening to an album together or completing a fitness challenge with a friend, SharePlay keeps everything and everyone perfectly in sync.
• iPad keeps getting smarter with advanced ML capabilities. Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognise text in a photo and allow users to take action. For example, a snapshot of a shopfront may reveal a phone number and the option to place a call.
• With next week’s release of iPadOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3, Universal Control will enable users to work with a single mouse and keyboard and move between Mac and iPad for a seamless experience, with no setup required. Users can even drag and drop content back and forth between devices, great for sketching with Apple Pencil on iPad and placing it into a Keynote slide on a Mac.

The new iPad Air is available to order beginning Saturday, 12 March, and will be in stores beginning Friday, 18 March, 2022.

The post Apple Introduces Most Powerful iPad Air. Ever. appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Apple has today introduced an all-new iPad Air, their most powerful, versatile, and colourful iPad Air ever.

Now available in five gorgeous finishes, iPad Air features an all-screen design with a larger 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display, camera and audio upgrades, a new integrated Touch ID sensor in the top button, and the powerful A14 Bionic for a massive boost in performance, making this by far the most powerful and capable iPad Air ever made.

“Today we’re excited to introduce a completely redesigned and far more powerful iPad Air, debuting Apple’s most powerful chip ever made, the A14 Bionic,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With its gorgeous new all-screen design, larger 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display, next-generation Touch ID, and a massive boost in performance with A14 Bionic, the new iPad Air brings customers powerful pro features at an even more affordable price. Along with major upgrades to the iPad Pro and eighth-generation iPad this year, and the powerful new features of iPadOS 14, this is our strongest iPad lineup ever, giving our customers even more ways to enrich their daily lives.”

The new iPad Air features a completely new thin and light design in five gorgeous finishes: silver, space grey, rose gold, green, and sky blue. The new all-screen design features a larger 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display for a stunning visual experience, with 3.8 million pixels and advanced technologies, including full lamination, P3 wide colour support, True Tone, and an anti-reflective coating for an amazing visual experience. To allow the display to extend on all sides, a next-generation Touch ID sensor is integrated into the top button, providing the same fast, easy, and secure way to unlock iPad Air, log in to apps, or use Apple Pay that customers know and love. iPad Air is compatible with Magic Keyboard and its floating design, and built-in trackpad, Smart Keyboard Folio, and new Smart Folio covers, as well as Apple Pencil, which attaches magnetically to the side for easy pairing, charging, and storing.

iPad Air delivers a massive boost in performance with Apple’s most advanced chip, A14 Bionic. Handling even the most demanding apps, A14 Bionic makes it even easier for users to edit 4K videos, create gorgeous works of art, play immersive games, and more. Using breakthrough 5-nanometer process technology, A14 Bionic is packed with 11.8 billion transistors for increased performance and power efficiency in nearly every part of the chip. This latest-generation A-series chip features a new 6-core design for a 40 percent boost in CPU performance, and a new 4-core graphics architecture for a 30 precent improvement in graphics. To deliver breakthrough machine learning capabilities, A14 Bionic includes a new 16-core Neural Engine that is twice as fast, and capable of performing up to 11 trillion operations per second, taking machine learning apps to a whole new level. A14 Bionic also includes second-generation machine learning accelerators in the CPU for 10 times faster machine learning calculations. This combination of the new Neural Engine, CPU machine learning accelerators, and high-performance GPU enables powerful on-device experiences for image recognition, natural language learning, analysing motion, and more.

iPad Air, which includes a 7MP front-facing FaceTime HD camera, now features the same 12MP rear camera used in iPad Pro for higher resolution photos and 4K video capture. The new design of iPad Air features stereo speakers in landscape mode, elevating the audio experience so users can enjoy wider stereo sound while watching video.

iPad Air now features a USB-C port for up to 5Gbps data transfer, which is 10 times faster for connecting to cameras, hard drives, and external monitors up to 4K. With Wi-Fi 6 performance and 60 percent faster LTE connectivity,3 along with A14 Bionic, this is by far the most powerful iPad Air ever.

iPadOS 14, available beginning Thursday, 17 September 2020, brings new features and designs that take advantage of the unique capabilities of iPad, such as its large Multi-Touch display, and versatile accessories. iPadOS 14 further integrates Apple Pencil into the iPad experience for better note-taking capabilities, and new ways to work with handwritten notes. When taking notes on iPad, Smart Selection uses on-device machine learning to distinguish handwriting from drawings, so handwritten text can easily be selected, cut, and pasted into another document as typed text using the same familiar gestures. Shape recognition allows users to draw shapes that are made geometrically perfect and snap right into place when adding diagrams and illustrations in Notes. Data detectors work seamlessly with handwritten text, recognising phone numbers, dates, addresses, and links, making it easy for users to perform actions like tapping a handwritten number to make a call.

iPadOS 14 also brings Scribble to iPad, allowing Apple Pencil users to handwrite directly in any text field, making actions like replying to a quick iMessage or searching in Safari fast and easy — all without ever needing to put Apple Pencil away. Scribble uses on-device machine learning to convert handwriting into typed text in real time, so writing is always kept private and secure.

iPadOS 14 makes the iPad experience even more distinctive and powerful in other ways, including:

• New compact designs for incoming FaceTime and phone calls, Siri interactions, and Search to help users stay focused on the task at hand.
• Universal Search to quickly find practically anything, from locating and launching apps, to accessing contacts, files, and information, to getting answers to common questions about people or places.
• New sidebars for many apps including Photos and Files, and streamlined toolbars that consolidate controls into a single place, making them more useful than ever.
• Beautifully redesigned widgets that present timely information at a glance right on the Home Screen.

The new iPad Air is designed to be environmentally friendly and supports Apple’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2030. The iPad Air uses a 100 percent recycled aluminium enclosure and 100 percent recycled tin for the solder on its main logic board. The new speakers in iPad Air also use magnets with 100 percent recycled rare earth elements. iPad Air remains free of harmful substances, is highly energy efficient, and uses wood fibre packaging that is recycled or comes from responsibly managed forests.

iPad Air joins the powerful iPad Pro, the eighth-generation iPad, and iPad mini to form the most advanced iPad lineup ever. The new iPad Air will be available starting next month.

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The post Apple Unveils New iPad Air appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Apple today introduced the all-new iPad Air in an ultra-thin 10.5-inch design, offering the latest innovations including Apple Pencil support and high-end performance at a breakthrough price.

With the A12 Bionic chip with Apple’s Neural Engine, the new iPad Air delivers a 70 percent boost in performance and twice the graphics capability, and the advanced Retina display with True Tone technology is nearly 20 percent larger with over half a million more pixels.

Apple today also introduced the new 7.9-inch iPad mini, a major upgrade for iPad mini fans who love a compact, ultra-portable design packed with the latest technology.

With the A12 Bionic chip, the new iPad mini is a powerful multi-tasking machine, delivering three times the performance and nine times faster graphics. The advanced Retina display with True Tone technology and wide colour support is 25 percent brighter and has the highest pixel density of any iPad, delivering an immersive visual experience in any setting. And with Apple Pencil support, the new iPad mini is the perfect take-anywhere notepad for sketching and jotting down thoughts on the go. The new iPads are available to order starting today and in stores next week.

“The iPad continues to provide magical new experiences for a growing range of uses where it is the absolute best device, from playing games in augmented reality to note-taking and drawing with Apple Pencil, from streaming HD movies and editing 4K films to learning to develop apps with Swift Playgrounds,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Today the iPad family takes two big leaps forward with an all-new 10.5-inch iPad Air that brings high-end size, features and performance at a breakthrough price, and a major upgrade to the 7.9-inch iPad mini, which also brings Apple Pencil, Retina display and the A12 Bionic chip to the many customers that love its compact size.”

Apple Pencil opens up new creativity and productivity possibilities for iPad mini and iPad Air users, from drawing and writing down thoughts to marking up documents and retouching photos. The must-have tool among students, professionals and creatives delivers a remarkably fluid and natural drawing experience and provides pixel-perfect accuracy and low latency for activities within popular apps including Procreate, Notability, Pixelmator Photo (coming soon) and Microsoft Office.

The Apple-designed Neural Engine of the A12 Bionic chip powers the next generation of apps and iPad workflows using advanced machine learning and Core ML for engaging AR experiences, photo-realistic effects in 3D games and stunning graphics performance within apps.

Staying connected is now easier and faster with iPad mini and iPad Air, featuring the same great Wi-Fi performance and Gigabit‑class LTE connectivity built into the most advanced iPad Pro models. With eSIM technology built in, users can easily connect to wireless data plans right from iPad when traveling in more than 180 countries around the world.

With advanced front- and back-facing cameras, iPad mini and iPad Air take gorgeous photos and capture clear and stable 1080p HD videos. The upgraded cameras with exceptional low-light performance and HD video recording are great for document scanning and connecting with friends and family on Group FaceTime calls, and with advanced sensors, help enable immersive AR experiences.

The App Store is the best place to discover more than 1.3 million apps designed specifically for iPad, from journaling with Apple Pencil to managing schedules and finances, editing photos, learning, connecting with friends and family, and playing games. Unlike stretched-out phone apps on other platforms, apps designed for iPad run and look great on every iPad.

iPad Air and iPad mini are perfect for staying productive on the go with iOS, helping users get things done faster with features like Siri Shortcuts, photo search and Voice Memos. The Dock provides quick access to frequently used apps and documents from any screen, and multitasking is easy with Split View and Slide Over. Drag and Drop makes moving images, text and files between apps easier than ever, and managing documents in the Files app is seamless and easy on iPad and across Apple devices.

Apple today announced an upcoming update to iWork for iOS, available next week, with enhanced integration of Apple Pencil including new animation options in Keynote that let users draw an animation path for any object, and an all-new user interface that enables easy implementation of build effects, including move, rotate and scale.

The new iPad Air and iPad mini join the most affordable 9.7-inch iPad and the most advanced iPad Pro models, offering the best, most innovative iPad lineup ever. The complete lineup now includes Apple Pencil support, best-in-class performance, advanced displays and all-day battery life for an experience unmatched by any other device.

The new iPad mini and iPad Air come in silver, space grey and gold finishes in 64GB and 256GB configurations.

The new iPad mini starts at RRP NZD $679 inc. GST for the Wi-Fi model and RRP NZD $899 inc. GST for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model and the 10.5-inch iPad Air starts at RRP NZD $849 inc. GST for the Wi-Fi model and RRP NZD $1069 inc. GST for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model from apple.com/nz, in the Apple Store app, and is also available through Apple Authorised Resellers and select carriers (prices may vary).

The post All-New iPad Air and iPad mini Deliver Power & Capability appeared first on Shane the Gamer.