Why does Apple want to destroy everything good about the iPad Air?

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Air quality

Interesting developments in the iPad rumorsphere, where the theory emerged last week that the next iPad Air, already expected to get a massive 12.9-inch display, will also enjoy an upgrade from LED to mini-LED screen technology. That’s what you currently get from the iPad Pro, and should deliver excellent power efficiency and improved image quality. Good news, right?

Wrong.

It’s always been understood that the Pro models are where you go to get the very best hardware Apple can offer. The payoff is that you have to, well, pay for the privilege. To be frank, the iPad Pro is outrageously expensive, and most of us can’t afford one (or just don’t want to).

The iPad Air, even within Apple’s confusing tablet line-up, clearly exists to cater to a different audience: one with a lower budget and less extreme requirements. It isn’t supposed to offer the very best specs. It’s supposed to represent a sweet-spot compromise between the extravagance of the Pro and the barebones austerity (an unlaminated screen! The very idea!) of the vanilla iPad.

Now granted, the 2024 Air will still technically sit between those two poles, thanks to the Pro’s probable imminent upgrade to OLED. But if you think Apple is going to bestow mini-LED tech on the Air—with a larger screen to boot—without significantly ramping up the price, you’re out of your mind. The Pro will get more expensive, but the Air will also get more expensive; and instead of being persuaded to pay big for display tech whose benefits they don’t completely understand, most buyers will instead drop down to the standard model and Apple’s iPad revenues will shrink still further.

At times I wonder if Apple understands what people want from their iPads. Or if it does, the company definitely doesn’t know how to give it to them. Most people want a relatively cheap, lightweight, reliable, instant-booting device to hold on the sofa and look up who was in the episode of Downton Abbey they’re currently watching. A very small number of people want a high-end laptop replacement. Pretty much nobody wants a large and incredibly expensive tablet that doesn’t have the best available screen tech and doesn’t work with Apple’s premium accessories.

What Apple should actually do, of course, is get rid of the Air entirely–or rather, get rid of its role as the inbetweener tablet and give the Air branding to whatever ends up being the cheapest available model. (This is one of the fixes I proposed in my thoughts on rebooting the iPad.) But since it’s not going to do that, the company should at least hold on to the iPad’s best feature, which is delivering a good feature set at a reasonable price. If it’s not going to do that, then what’s the point of the iPad Air at all?

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Podcast of the week

This year, Apple wants to make a big impression with its AI efforts. We’re starting to get a peek as to what we could expect, and it starts with Apple’s chips. We talk about the upcoming A18 Pro and the M4 chips and Apple’s plans, in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

• Apple Time Machine review: An outstanding solution for local backups.
• Best password managers for Mac and iPhone.
• Satechi USB-C Multiport 8K dock review: A pint-sized powerhouse.

The rumor mill

The Notes app may get a huge update this year.

Apple’s ambitious M4 Mac roadmap will finally give every model the latest chip.

Surprising report claims the iPhone 17 Plus will have a smaller screen.

Report: iOS 18’s big AI push won’t need the cloud.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

Apple addresses predictive emoji ‘bug’ in latest iOS 17.5 beta after social media outrage.

iOS 17.5 beta 2 is now available with app downloads from websites in EU.

The second beta of macOS 14.5 is here.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.