apple went totally all out this year
with the ipad air 5 because they gave it the m1 chip yes the same chip that comes
in the more expensive ipad pro so with that said you think that it's a much
better buy save 200 bucks get the same m1 why not well that's what we're gonna
figure out in this video including testing things like the speakers the
cameras the displays the display performance and reflectivity and a bunch
of other stuff that we're going to be talking about in this video so let's go
ahead and get into the design comparison first now the first thing you want to
start off with is comparing the back sides and a very interesting detail that
apple added this year is the ipad air text whereas it used to always just say
ipad like you can see here on the 11 inch ipad pro just says ipad now the
biggest difference that we can notice is actually the camera modules on the new
ipad air 5 you still get the same 12 megapixel rear camera but on the ipad
pro you get this nice square bump that has an additional ultra wide 12
megapixel camera as well and you get a flash which for some reason apple didn't
add a flash to the ipad air i have no idea why and then of course you have the
little microphone cutout now this is actually a big deal to me because if
you're using the magic keyboard case the ipad pro square bump fits it perfectly
but of course on the ipad air when you hook it up to that case you have the
little gap there and it doesn't look as clean but that's not that big of a deal
and now moving over to the top side we see a couple of differences first of all
the speaker cutouts on the ipad pro are a little bit smaller and i think it does
have less holes now this is actually an interesting difference because when
you're holding it in your hand like this you tend to block less of the speaker
cutouts which is nice in terms of sound quality and a big difference here i want
to mention is that they also have speaker grilles on the bottom but there
is a very big difference in terms of the speakers because the ipad pro actually
has four of them so that's quad stereo compared to only two one on each side on
the ipad air so half of these speaker grills are actually fake and then
another big difference on the top is actually in terms of the power button
because the ipad pro has a regular basic power button but the ipad air 5 has the
same touch id power button from last year or at least the last ipad air 4.
and this is actually a big deal because the ipad pro comes with face id which i
personally love and i think is just so much better than touch id on the ipad
air because sometimes it doesn't work and it just doesn't authenticate and you
obviously have to reach up touch it which could be annoying especially if
it's on the magic keyboard case compared to the ipad pro you simply tap the space
bar and it unlocks and now the last thing i want to talk about before we
move on to the displays and comparing other things like the speakers
is the usb type c ports now of course they both have the
m1 chip so you think they can both support thunderbolt
however apple gave the ipad air 5 a usb type-c port it is twice as fast as the
last one so it's 10 gigabits per second but the ipad pro actually supports
thunder bolt so it supports speeds up to 40 gigabits per second so in just a
minute i'm actually going to connect an ssd and test out the transfer speeds but
before we get into that let's actually get into the displays right here now on
the front everything looks extremely similar except of course you could see
those black face id sensors at the top on the ipad pro but one major difference
that i am noticing is actually the display bezels yes the bezels on the
ipad pro do look slimmer and this is a difference that you can notice day to
day it's a subtle difference but it is definitely there and before i jump into
comparing the actual display quality i want to pivot over to the speaker
comparison test so let's see which one has the better speakers
[Music] [Applause]
[Music] [Music]
holy moly guys that is a absolutely massive difference first of all the
volume difference is huge the ipad pro which is so much louder but just
everything the bass is tighter it's deeper the overall sound stage is wider
you can hear the separation of frequencies from the different speakers
the little tiny tunes are just brought up and they're brought out whereas
they're kind of muted on the ipad air and the vocals are just so rich and
clear compared to the ipad air just sounds weak in comparison to the ipad
pro just listen to this [Music]
that's nuts yeah the speakers on the
ipad pro by far much better and i know there's a 200
difference between the ipad air and the ipad pro that's 600 compared to 800 but
right now on amazon you can buy this for 750 dollars brand new on sale so only
150 difference and man i care about the speakers a lot and this by itself
i don't know might be enough to make that decision as you guys can see the
ipad air 5 has the new ultra wide selfie camera which does support center stage
and the difference between the microphones is the ipad pro actually has
studio quality microphones and it has five of them compared to just two so
hopefully you guys can hear a microphone difference so let me switch over to the
ipad pro here i am on the ipad pro let me know if there is in fact a microphone
quality difference or not because there should be because apple advertises it so
yeah also let me know if you see any difference in the ultra wide cameras
there honestly should not be but there might and now before we move on to
comparing the display quality the brightness the hdr video and things like
that i do want to test out the storage speed and the new usbc connector so i
have jazz disc bench right here let's go ahead and run the test first of all it
appears that the ipad air 5 is actually slightly faster 1741 megabytes per
second compared to 1391 for the read and then 2169 compared to 2031. now that
might be just a margin of error difference but if we go down to the
random 4k read and write it looks like the
read on the ipad is faster but then it's swapped over for the ipad pro but i
think they should be around the same so no major differences now i grabbed an
ssd this is actually a thunderbolt ssd from sabrent and this supports both usbc
and thunderbolt at the same time so let's go ahead and compare the
difference in transfer speeds all right so i connected the ssd and i'm trying to
find a big file here's actually wwdc from last year i'm going to try to go
ahead and throw it onto my ipad and i have a stopwatch right here to see how
long it takes oh that was done three seconds so the ipad pro with
thunderbolt took only three seconds to transfer that now let's go ahead and
test it on the ipad air and now over on the ipad air let's test it out huh not
that big of a difference honestly for that file 3.88 seconds so slightly
longer on the ipad air 5. now this is actually quite weird because the ipad
pro should be much faster in terms of transfer speeds it should be four times
up to four times as fast so what i did is i grabbed an actual thunder bolt ssd
and i'm going to transfer to larger files just to make sure that we're
having a thunderbolt connection because this supports both so maybe there could
be some kind of issue where it's choosing
usbc instead of thunderbolt so let's transfer another file so i've been
trying to get these two ssds to connect but ipad os has this weird issue
with drives connecting and they just don't
show up in the files app apple please fix this because this is annoying and i
just can't run this test because of it so let's move on to the next one and now
moving on to the display quality the first thing i want to mention is the
difference in display brightness so as you can see right here the ipad pro is a
little bit brighter than the ipad air because it has 600 nits compared to 500
so that is a nice difference for when you're in a bright room or potentially
outside but my absolute favorite difference is the fact that the ipad pro
comes with 120hz pro motion display technology so
it allows the refresh rate to ramp from 24 hertz up to 120 so when you're
swiping and scrolling reading looking through apps swiping through twitter
everything is incredibly sharp and smooth there's no motion blur
everything's just buttery smooth compared to the ipad air that has a
solid 60hz display and it just looks choppy and i just can't stand it because
i actually have the iphone 13 pro max and this also has 120 hertz promotion
and when you get used to this it becomes so hard to go back to a 60 hertz ipad
and another benefit for the ipad pro with promotion is actually battery life
because if you're watching a video that's filmed at 24 or 30 fps like on
youtube you are gonna be saving battery life compared to the ipad air which is
always at 60 hertz and then on top of that if you are an artist and you use
the apple pencil the pro motion tech actually helps reduce the latency and
make it feel much more smooth and natural on the ipad pro compared to the
ipad air now in terms of actually watching videos both of them have
extremely similar video display quality but the ipad pro does get a little bit
brighter so honestly they both look
absolutely incredible these displays look really really good and now with the
displays out of the way let's finally get into the performance testing and as
you can see i have geekbench 5 open right here and they both have 8
gigabytes of ram however with the ipad pro if you up the storage to a terabyte
or higher you actually get double you get 16 gigs of ram and that's the only
way to get that on an ipad with the ipad pro whereas the ipad air is just stuck
to the same eight gigs and another big difference is that it comes with only 64
gigs of storage compared to 128 on the ipad pro for the base price so if
you were to actually try to get more storage on the ipad air you're forced to
go to 256 gigs which costs 750 dollars which is exactly how much
you can buy an ipad pro for right now on amazon on sale using the link in the
description so let's go ahead and run the cpu benchmark and there you go no
surprises they both have the m1 chip so they're both almost identical in terms
of the cpu performance but let me actually test the graphics to see if
apple did apply some sort of limit to the ipad air by surprise and there you
go just as expected basically the same performance between the two so that
definitely sounds great for the ipad air but i do want to point out a very big
difference that kind of makes it hard to recommend the ipad air over the ipad pro
well because of the 120hz pro motion support on the ipad pro there are a lot
of games on the ios app store which support 120 fps gaming mode
so you could actually take advantage of the m1 chip and get crazy good frame
rates and you could be a lot more competitive in games like pokemon unite
call of duty gentian impact for example but on the ipad air you have all of that
performance that you just can't take advantage of because you're limited by
the 60 hertz display so even though it gets the m1 i'm just so disappointed
that it's limited to 60 hertz so with all of that testing and comparing out of
the way let's finally get into the main conclusion and we're going to answer the
question of is it worth just buying the ipad air and saving some money 150 bucks
to 200 over just going for the more expensive
ipad pro and the way i'm gonna conclude this is by mentioning three main
differences between the two the first thing is of course the usbc port where
we actually have thunderbolt on the ipad pro now this is actually going to be a
big deal for all the people out there who care about thunderbolt and have a
lot of thunderbolt accessories and who use their ipad for professional use
cases like video or photo editing that's going to be nice but for the common man
this new usb type c port with up to 10 gigabits per second is honestly fast
enough so that's not going to be that big of a game changer now the second
thing is actually the speakers and if you really care about speakers the ones
on the ipad pro are quite a bit better and i really do so this is a big deal
for me but maybe not a lot of people care about that so the third thing is
the 120 hertz promotion tech on the ipad pro and i would honestly say that this
by itself is worth the extra 150 to 200 for the
ipad pro because it makes it feel like it's a lot snappier and it's just
buttery smooth scrolling through everything especially using the apple
pencil you have lowered latency and especially for anybody who cares about
gaming that is going to be a very big deal and it's a really huge deal to me
because i also have 120hz promotion on my iphone so whenever i use
the ipad air with a 60hz display it just looks and feels choppy and that bugs me
so with all of that said yes the people who don't really care about those things
can definitely save the money go for the ipad air but if you care about any of
those three things that i mentioned go for the ipad pro so there you guys go
hopefully you enjoyed this hands-on comparison and if you did go ahead and
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next video [Music]