Apple iPad Air (2020) Review

 That's 20 percent higher on Geekbench Multicore and 22 percent better on web browsing than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, the most powerful Android device currently available. It's 58 percent faster on Geekbench and 44 percent faster on Antutu than the base 2020 iPad. This is a super-fast chipset.

The 2020 models of the iPad Pro use an A12Z processor with eight CPU and eight graphics cores, as opposed to the A14's six CPU and four graphics cores. Each of the A14 cores is better, but the A12Z has more of them, so comparing the Air to the Pro is a mixed bag.

The Air scored about the same on 3DMark as the Pro and scored 25 percent better on the Geekbench Compute benchmark, but got overpowered by sheer coreage on some of the other tests. The Pro scored 15 percent ahead of the Air on Antutu, and 16 percent better on Geekbench multi-core.

 

I don't have a Surface Go 2 on hand for comparisons, but Geekbench's browser says that the Intel Core m3 version scores up to 1605 in multi-core—less than half of what the A14 accomplishes.

All of these numbers mean absolutely impeccable performance on the iPad Air. No matter what I was doing, whether it was video chats, action games, or Apple Pencil-enabled art programs, it was smooth and responsive.

The one weak spot in this entire review is battery life: iPads have never been great at screen-on time in our tests. This one managed to stream YouTube for just 4 hours, 45 minutes before needing a charge, even shorter than previous models. I'm going to run another battery test to see if that holds up and will update this section with my results.

The iPad Air has a 12-megapixel main camera, the same as the main camera on the iPad Pro, and a 7-megapixel front-facing camera, again the same as the front camera on the Pro. The main camera is a bit of an improvement over the base iPad's 8-megapixel sensor—it records 4K video rather than 1080p, and has better HDR and low-light capabilities.

But the real news here—and one of the big reasons you want this tablet in 2020—is the front-facing camera. The low-cost iPad has a grainy 1.2-megapixel camera that's better than a laptop webcam, but not by much. The iPad Air has a 7-megapixel front camera with much stronger low-light capabilities and makes you look infinitely better on Zoom calls.