iPad Air M3 Review: The Tablet That Doesn’t Know What It Wants to Be
A gorgeous screen and a chip with nothing to do. Apple won’t let it.
The hardware is excellent. The software still treats it like a big iPhone. If you want a media slab, save your money. If you want a laptop, buy a laptop.
Score
7.2/ 10
★★★½☆
Verdict
Wait
Good, but a better price or a fix is coming — hold off for now.
Published
By Lytyear
Quick verdict
Who it's for
Note-takers, artists, and anyone who wants a premium media device. Not a laptop replacement.
The good
- M3 is absurdly fast for a tablet — it never breaks a sweat
- Liquid Retina display is color-accurate and bright enough outdoors
- All-day battery with real use
The bad
- iPadOS still walls off the file system and multitasking
- Stage Manager is half-baked without an external display
- No OLED at this price
The M3 in this tablet is the same chip that ships in MacBooks. It is, on paper, wildly overqualified. And that’s the whole problem with the iPad Air in 2026: Apple sold you a sports car and built the roads for a golf cart.
The good part
The screen is lovely — color-accurate, bright enough for a coffee shop, plenty sharp for reading and drawing. Battery runs all day. The M3 doesn’t break a sweat on anything you’d actually do, which means it’ll stay fast for years.
Apple Pencil Pro is the best stylus on any tablet. The barrel roll, the haptic click, the squeeze palette — it’s input done by people who care about input. If you draw or take handwritten notes, it’s worth the price of admission.
The wall
iPadOS. It’s the same story and it’s getting harder to be patient about. The file system is gated. External drives work, but awkwardly. Stage Manager wants to be windowed multitasking and it is, sort of, if you squint and plug in a monitor. Pro apps exist, but the OS keeps reminding you you’re on a phone OS stretched out.
The M3 is fast enough to edit 4K video. The software makes that edit feel like workarounds.
The value question
The Air is the “reasonable” iPad — until you add the keyboard and the Pencil and suddenly you’re at MacBook money for a device that does less. If you want a laptop, the MacBook Air is cheaper and freer.
The verdict
As a media slab and a notebook, it’s excellent. As the computer Apple keeps implying it could be, it’s stuck. Buy it for what it is, not what the keynote suggested.
Specs at a glance
- Display
- 11" or 13" Liquid Retina IPS, 500 nits
- Chipset
- Apple M3
- Storage
- 128GB – 1TB
- Battery
- ~10 hrs mixed use
- Stylus
- Apple Pencil Pro (separate)
- Connector
- USB-C
Pros and cons
What we like
- M3 is absurdly fast for a tablet — it never breaks a sweat
- Liquid Retina display is color-accurate and bright enough outdoors
- All-day battery with real use
- Apple Pencil is the best stylus input on any tablet
What we don't
- iPadOS still walls off the file system and multitasking
- Stage Manager is half-baked without an external display
- No OLED at this price
- You’ll pay $300+ to make it a “laptop” with keyboard and Pencil
