Sometimes Apple creates revolutionary products. And sometimes, Apple takes an iconic gadget and locks it into place, polishing its form year after year. The "Perfected Product" is a path that devices like the iPod and, most recently, the MacBook Air have settled into: slight tweaks, and designs that started to become practically identical.
While the iPhone is a gadget that's still in evolution, the iPad feels pretty close to perfection. And the iPad Air 2 hasn't done all that much to change the equation. It's even thinner than last year's version. It has a faster processor. It has improved cameras. It has a Touch ID sensor. It has an anti-reflective display. Its storage options are a little more affordable, if you're the type to pay up to 64 or 128GB. It's still $500 for 16GB (available in the UK and Australia for £400 and AU$620, respectively), but $600, £480, AU$740 now gets you 64GB, and $700, £560, AU$860 128GB. And yes, it comes in optional gold-ish tinged metal.
Are these reasons enough to get a new iPad? Maybe not: iPads last forever, and you can hold onto one for years like a laptop, before needing a new one. The new iPad is an excellent product, and the Air 2 is now alone at the top of the heap since the smaller Mini 3 lacks its newer processor and cameras. And it's very important to note that last year's model, the original iPad Air, remains available at a discounted price; for many, that will arguably be the better bang for the buck.
The iPad doesn't do anything startling or new. But it is even more polished, essentially a perfect iPad, and an improvement on an already-stellar tablet. Whether it meets your needs depends on whether you need an iPad or a tablet in the first place. You probably already know the answer. Short of Apple designing a true MacBook-meets-iPad product, the Air 2 is as refined as it gets, and has a catalog of apps that's without match.
Design: Air, but even thinner
Somehow, the new iPad Air 2 is actually thinner than the previous iPad Air: at 6.1 millimeters, it's thinner than the iPhone 6, and probably any other gadget you own. It's thinner than a pencil, a magazine, and probably a thick manila envelope stuffed with a few papers. There are thinner and lighter tablets out there, but this new Air is the thinnest iOS device of the current crop.
Apple clearly has a thin fetish. The iPad Air 2 manages to be even thinner than the iPad Air. Nobody was complaining that the iPad Air was too thick. Did an even thinner design need to happen? Apple does this to its laptops, its phones, and yes, its iPads. Sure, the slightly lighter body makes it a little easier to hold, but this isn't as dramatic as the iPad Air's design was last year. This is just another tweak. Smaller is better, but in a bag this won't feel like a difference-maker. Holding it, I could immediately notice it felt a bit lighter. At 0.96 pounds (437g) for the Wi-Fi version of the Air 2 versus 1 pound (469g) for last year's Air (Wi-Fi plus cellular models weigh in at 0.98 pound or 444g for the second-gen Air versus 1.05 pounds or 478g for the previous model), it's nothing like the nearly half-pound weight reduction in 2013.
The iPad's form is still wonderfully refined: clean, solid metal and glass, sharp and easy to hold. It's also still just as potentially fragile as before, meaning you'd better sheathe this in a case in case you drop it. It's clearly made to be slipped into a case. No, I haven't tried bending it, but like any thin gadget, I'd advise treating it nicely.
Gold, silver and space gray color options amount to a choice of black or white-colored glass around the display, and a subtle range of metal tones on the back. Space gray's metal is a darker aluminum, while the new gold feels a little more like a subtle bronzing.
Touch ID and Apple Pay: One-finger convenience
The iPad Air 2 finally has Touch ID, a feature seen in last year's iPhone 5S and left off 2013's iPad Air and iPad Mini. The one-touch fingerprint identification of Touch ID works astonishingly well, and comes in handy for unlocking, iTunes transactions, or any other app that takes advantage of its use.
On an iPhone, the one-thumb Touch ID press feels natural: I end up using it dozens of times a day. On the iPad, pressing the home button is done less often, and is something I tend to do while sitting down, with my forefinger. It's more of a log-into-your-PC type action. And, since that Touch ID button doesn't stay in one place -- it could be on the top, or bottom, or left or right -- finding it and choosing which finger to use at any moment isn't quite as intuitive: occasionally, I had to flip the iPad around. It's not a big deal, but it took a bit of getting used to.
The way Touch ID works on the iPad feels more like a precursor for the inevitable adoption of Touch ID in Macs, a way to log in and authenticate while using apps. It's not as essential on an iPad as it feels on the iPhone, but it's a surprisingly convenient feature. Apps such as Evernote and several password managers use it. It saves remembering another lengthy password.
Apple Pay has made its way onto the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3, but without NFC for tap-to-pay. Instead, the iPad stores credit card information centrally and allows apps that choose to fold in Apple Pay to use it to make one-touch payments. The whole set-up process is effortless and works quickly, but there are caveats: your credit card needs to be Apple Pay-ready, which not all are yet (corporate cards, in particular), and Web-based transactions can't take advantage of it yet...which is a shame, since a lot of people do direct Web-based shopping. For now, you'll have to wait for apps, and there aren't many at the moment that work with it.
A8X performance a big blast of speed
For the first time in two years, the big 9.7-inch iPad's gotten its own bumped-up processor to stand over the rest of the iPhones and iPads. A new A8X processor promises extra graphics muscle versus the A8 on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. And there's a little more, too: for the first time, the iPad's finally gotten a RAM boost: 2GB based on what GeekBench 3's diagnostics reveal, up from 1GB.
The iPad Air 2, on pure benchmarks, screams past as the faster iOS device ever, as you'd expect. I ran 3DMark, a popular graphics benchmarking app, and its Ice Storm Unlimited test ran at an average overall score of 21,744, a good step above the latest iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and a big bump over last year's iPad Air. Some Android tablets like the Nvidia Shield Tablet have showed better 3DMark performance, but this is the best iOS graphics performance by a good large margin. Last year's iPad Air performed similarly to the iPhone 5S; this year, there's an incentive for the larger form.
On Geekbench 3, the single-core test averaged higher than before, but the big story was multi-core: an average score of 4506 vaulted way above other iOS devices, suggesting this may be the best multitasking iPad ever. It's not quite 2x the iPad Air's A7 processor, but it's close. iOS doesn't always allow tons of multitasking, but maybe this iPad will help change that.
But what does that mean to the average person, exactly? I loaded a bunch of games and apps on the iPad Air 2, and A8-optimized games like Modern Combat 5, Asphalt 8 and Epic's Zen Garden demo all loaded up and performed excellently, and performed without any hiccups. But I was also able to switch between apps quickly, and apps didn't end up "quitting out" as rapidly as they do on older iPads: in other words, apps are cached better.
Serious graphics or photo editors, those who edit or use creative video or music apps, or hardcore iPad gamers who want bleeding-edge graphics, this is your new dream machine. But the average iPad user may not ever reach a point where this performance is needed.
It's all a significant step above the iPad Mini 3, which only has the same A7 processor as last year's iPads. But, again, if you're a casual iPad user who's mainly streaming videos, reading, writing, and playing some games, you're probably not going to need the iPad Air 2's extra oomph.
