Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: Superb, but this tablet is over-powered and overpriced

It feels faintly ridiculous to me that the iPad Air I am sitting at writing this review right now, is more powerful than the M1 Mac Mini I have been using to do my day-to-day work for the past four years.

I have rarely felt the Mac Mini is underpowered – it needs more RAM than the regular 8GB allocation and once I get to 50 or more open tabs in Chrome, then – yes – things begin to creak a little. But on an iPad – a tablet – I can never see me running out of juice with an M3 under the hood.

Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: What you need to know

And yet, here we are. The 2025 Apple iPad Air is now powered by an Apple M3 chip. It’s not quite the same M3 as found in the 2024 MacBook Air but it’s close enough, with the same eight CPU cores but, oddly, a nine-core GPU where the MacBook had either eight or ten.

It’s backed up by 8GB of RAM and has between 128GB and 1TB of storage – the same specifications as last year, in other words. And we have the same selection of colours, too – space grey and starlight are accompanied by purple (pictured here) and blue.

Nothing else of note has changed. The Air still sits in the iPad range as a more affordable, but slightly chunkier alternative to the iPad Pro. It has the same 264ppi 60Hz Liquid Retina IPS display, available in 11in and 13in sizes, an identical slab-sided aluminium chassis complete with Center Stage webcam in the long top edge and the same single rear 12-megapixel f/1.8 camera.

And – just like last year – you can add the Magic Keyboard to turn your iPad Air into a laptop replacement (that keyboard now has a function key row), and there’s support for either the Apple Pencil USB-C or Apple Pencil Pro for sketching and note taking directly on the screen.

Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: Price and competition

Apple loaned me the 11in model for this review, which is the cheapest version. When I say cheapest, though, I mean that only in the sense that it’s less expensive than the iPad Pro.

Prices start at £599 for the tablet on its own (the iPad Pro starts at £999). The Magic Keyboard adds £269 to this and the Apple Pencil Pro another £129. In total, that brings the full price of the full package to £997.

The 13in iPad Air (M3, 2025) is £200 more expensive for the tablet (£799) and the keyboard – being larger – is an extra £30. Throw in a Pencil Pro and you’ll be paying £1,227.

For a system with 128GB of storage that’s an awful lot to pay and with the new M4 MacBook Air coming in at around £930 right now (which comes with the faster M4 processor), you’ll have to want the touchscreen and stylus capabilities an awful lot to justify stumping up. That’s assuming you want the iPad Air as a laptop replacement device.

And if you don’t, why not just buy the regular 11in iPad instead? This might lack Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard compatibility but you can get one with the Apple Pencil USB-C and the Bluetooth-based Magic Keyboard Folio for a total of £657 – a fairly hefty saving of £340.

The main rivals to the iPad Air on the Android front come from Samsung’s stable of tablets: the Galaxy Tab S9 FE (£449) and S9 FE+ (£479). The former is a 10.9in tablet, the latter a 12.4in option, so roughly analogous to the new iPads – and a LOT cheaper, too, although bear in mind that the new Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE and FE+ are almost certainly imminent and will be more expensive.

Our favourite alternative, however, is the OnePlus Pad 2, which at the time of writing is £449 and includes the price of the keyboard case for free. Android and Google Play are not a match for iPadOS and the Apple App Store, and there is no larger 13in model, but at less than half the price of an iPad Air 11in and with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage on board, the OnePlus Pad 2 is a seriously tempting buy. You could, in fact, buy two for the price of one 11in iPad Air.

Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: Design

The 2025 iPad Air M3 changes nothing about the physical design whatsoever. The 11in model measures 179 x 6.1 x 248mm (WDH) and weighs 460g (the same, give or take a couple of grammes, as the 2024 iPad Air 11in), and the 13in model is 215 x 6.1 x 281mm (WDH) – again the same as last year – and weighs 616g.

The tablets themselves are rather svelte and feel solidly made but if you were hoping for the iPad Air and Magic Keyboard to rival lightweight laptops, then think again. Together, this keyboard case and tablet pairing is rather chunky, measuring 15.2mm thick and weighing a not-insignificant 1.1kg – and that’s for the smaller 11in model.

Around the edges are the usual selection of buttons, speaker grilles and ports. Assuming you’re looking at the tablet in landscape, the volume up and down sit on the top edge towards the left side with the power/fingerprint sensor button just around the corner on the short left edge. There are twin speaker grilles on the left and right edges, with the latter also hosting the tablet’s USB-C port, while the top edge hides a set of magnets and wireless charging coils – this is where you dock your Apple Pencil Pro to charge and store it.

Towards the front, we have the screen, surrounded by a fairly chunky bezel – measuring roughly 11mm thick – with the Center Stage 12-megapixel webcam mounted in the long bezel above the screen. And on the rear is the single 12-megapixel f/1.8 camera in the top right corner with a small LED flash just to its left and the three pogo pin contacts for the Magic Keyboard sit on the left side.

And that Magic Keyboard is just as good as ever. The cantilevered hinge design is just brilliant – it helps the display to “float” just in front of your fingers, making it really easy to reach out and touch the screen for scrolling and the like – while typing on the backlit keyboard is as comfortable as on any laptop. This is why you’d buy the iPad Air over the regular iPad. The standard Magic Folio Keyboard simply isn’t as good.

You might also want to opt for the iPad Air over the iPad because it supports the Apple Pencil Pro. Again, this is an expensive accessory at £129, but it does add quite a few features over and above the USB-C model, including magnetic wireless charging, tilt shading and haptic control, a feature I really love. To use it, just give the barrel a squeeze and up pops a context sensitive menu, allowing you to switch tools quickly and easily.

Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: Display

The display is decent, too. At 11in or 13in across the diagonal and with a pixel density of 245ppi, it’s as sharp as you need and it performs very well.

It peaks at 533cd/m² and, when I tested it with Portrait Display’s Calman software and DisplayCAL, I found that colour reproduction and accuracy were spot on. It’s capable of reproducing 98% of the P3 colour space, and the Delta E colour error was 0.95 in sRGB and 1.27 in DCI-P3. No wonky colours here.

However, if you compare and contrast what you get elsewhere, it does fall behind a little. The OnePlus Pad 2, for instance, comes with a screen that uses similar IPS tech, but runs at up to 900 nits brightness and 144Hz for ultra-smooth scrolling and screen animations.

And as the panel tech is IPS, the black level isn’t brilliant. In a dark room, black areas on screen, particularly the bars above and below your movie will look a little on the grey side. For that reason, HDR playback won’t look as impressive as it does on an OLED screen, either, the likes of which you’ll see on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ or the Galaxy Tab S9.

Apple iPad Air (M3, 2025) review: Performance and battery life

As for performance, that’s definitely not an area where the iPad Air is lacking. The M3 processor inside the is an eight-core part (four performance cores, four efficiency cores) running at up to 4.05GHz with a nine-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. From the benchmarks, it looks like the GPU is the same as the M2 iPad Air, but the CPU results indicate that the M3 iPad Air is faster than anything else, other than the M4 iPad Pro.

It’s faster than the M2 iPad Air, faster than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+ and the OnePlus Pad 2 and leagues in front of the Honor Pad 9. In short, there is nothing you can throw at this iPad that it will struggle with from a performance perspective. You can even use it for relatively serious tasks such as video editing using apps like DaVinci Resolve and 3D modelling using apps like Shapr 3D and it won’t miss a beat.

The only thing you might have an issue with is that moving very large files around will take some time, as the USB-C port is limited to 10Gbits/sec speeds. That, and the fact that iPadOS still isn’t the greatest OS for doing proper work on, mainly because its File Manager app isn’t all that good.

Surprisingly, you might also have a problem with the battery life, which is fine but can’t match the battery life of a MacBook Air. In our simple tests, where we set the display to a brightness of 170cd/m², enable flight mode and play a low resolution video on loop, the 11in iPad Air lasted a mere 11hrs 40mins. That’s about par for a tablet of this size, but falls a long way short of the M4 MacBook Air, which lasted 15hrs 52mins.

Apple iPad Air M3, 2025 review: Verdict

Ultimately, it’s this comparison with the MacBook Air that casts the most unfavourable light on the iPad Air M3. It’s a brilliant tablet, no doubt. It’s cheaper than the iPad Pro M4, which is vastly overpriced in my view, and it’s almost as well equipped. If you want an Apple tablet/laptop hybrid and you don’t want to spend upwards of £1,349 on it, then this is the machine for you.

Even then though, it’s expensive; so expensive, in fact, that the M4 MacBook Air can be had for less money if you look in the right places. And for that money you’re getting a more powerful, capable computer, with a longer lasting battery, better connectivity and more storage.

You could argue that it’s a different product aimed at different people and, yes, to a certain extent that is true. But if you’re really buying it as a laptop replacement (if you aren’t, then it makes even less sense – you might as well buy a standard iPad for £329), then I think you owe it to yourself to ask yourself if you really need – or could make do without – a touchscreen and stylus.