Testing the iPad Air M4 as a multi-disciplinary artist: does it stack up?

I found this review very easy to write. Just over two years ago I reviewed the M2 Ipad Air and gave it 4 stars. This is the M4 version and externally there is nothing groundbreaking to update but internally, well that’s different story.

When I reviewed the 13-inch M2 iPad Air, it was the first Air that really made me question whether I actually needed an iPad Pro. The combination of the M2 chip and 8GB of RAM made it a surprisingly capable creative machine, particularly for drawing, digital sculpting and video editing. A large part of my income comes from content made on an iPad so it does really matter to me.

I've been using iPad Pros for professional creative work since they were first released and I'm less interested in whether the Air can browse the web quickly, give me the best photos or open multiple Safari tabs. I want to know what happens when you start opening large Procreate canvases, create complex 3D sculpts with Nomad Sculpt or ZBrush or use other demanding creative applications. Is this still the best iPad for drawing?

The test model this time was the 13-inch iPad Air with the M4 chip and, importantly for creative users, 12GB of unified memory. On paper, that's a significant step forward from the M2 model I previously tested (They also followed that with an M3). It also brings the Air increasingly close to the sort of specifications that, not too long ago, were reserved for Apple's Pro machines. That additional 4GB of RAM make a real difference for both 2D and 3D applications.

The big question this time isn't really whether the iPad Air is powerful enough. It almost certainly is for most users. The question is how much closer the M4 and 12GB of memory bring it to the iPad Pro, and whether creative professionals still need to spend the extra money.

Design and display

At first glance, there isn't necessarily a huge amount here to make an existing iPad Air owner rush out and upgrade. Apple has reached the point where the basic iPad design is incredibly refined, and there are only so many ways you can change a thin aluminium rectangle without changing it simply for the sake of it. I have had this unit on my desk next to my M1 iPad Pro and, without stopping to inspect it, I can’t tell the difference.

When I reviewed the M2 Air, I commented on the difference in thickness between the Air and the iPad Pro. In reality, I've never found a millimetre here or there particularly important. I nearly always use my iPads in a Folio case, Magic Keyboard or drawing setup, so once the machine is in a case those tiny differences become largely irrelevant. Holding is in the hand at just over 600g is a pleasant experience and its doesn’t significantly heat up until you start doing video work. Then it needs to be in a case on a desk.

The 13-inch format remains one of my favourite things about this model for creative work. The larger canvas makes a real difference when you're drawing, sculpting or editing, particularly when an application such as ZBrush or Lumafusion that has toolbars, palettes and menus competing with your artwork for screen space.

The Liquid Retina display has a resolution of 2732 x 2048 pixels and Is almost the same as the iPad Pro and has been like that for a few models. It isn't the same display technology you'll find on the current iPad Pro and there's still no nano-texture glass or option That distinction matters more to me than the thickness of the device. Having used nano-texture glass on the Pro, reflections become much more noticeable when you return to a conventional glossy iPad screen.

For most users, though, this is still an excellent display. Colour reproduction is great from the 2D apps I tried, brightness is good considering the difference (600nits on the Air vs 1600nits on the HDR Pro) and the sheer size of the 13-inch panel makes it a very comfortable creative workspace.

Apple Pencil Pro support also means you get exactly the same pen experience as the higher end machines and that give you access to the barrel rolling and tap features which some 2D artists seem to like.

Performance

This is where things become considerably more interesting.

The previous 13-inch Air I reviewed used Apple's M2 chip with 8GB of RAM. That machine surprised me with just how far I could push it before I started running into limitations. The new model combines an 8-core M4 CPU with 12GB of unified memory. That means we're not simply looking at a newer processor. Apple has increased the memory from 8GB to 12GB, giving this Air 50% more unified memory than the M2 model I previously tested. That make a huge difference things like increased layer number in 2D programs or massively increasing your polygon count in sculpting programs.

For everyday use, that's largely overkill. You don't need an M4 processor and 12GB of memory for email, streaming and browsing. For creative applications, however, the extra headroom becomes much more interesting and for more professional users it is becoming a realistic option at the lower price point. I cannot see any different in performance when using Procreate on this device compared to my older iPad models (it's certainly heading to the best iPad for Procreate guide). The line work and painting are lag free and butter smooth.

One thing worth reiterating is that additional RAM doesn't automatically make every operation faster. The benefit becomes more apparent when applications start dealing with larger files, more layers, higher polygon counts or multiple applications competing for memory. I opened all kind of apps during the testing and left them all open as it made no difference to performance

The question isn't whether the M4 Air feels fast. It does. The more useful question is how long you can keep increasing the complexity of a project before the Air reminds you that it isn't an iPad Pro. I didn’t reach that point at any stage with 2D and 3D apps for the most part. There was some performance lag when I switch everything in the post processing tab (Realtime rendering) in Nomad Sculpt and I did feel the iPad heating up in my hands but not excessively.

iPad Air as a creative tool

This is the area that interests me most. For my previous M2 review, I stopped using my normal 16GB iPad Pro for a week and replaced it with the Air. I'm approaching this model in much the same way.

Drawing and painting aren't particularly difficult tasks for modern iPads, and even Apple's less expensive models can deliver an excellent experience. The more interesting tests come when you deliberately start pushing resolution, layers and memory.

PROCREATE

One of my tests on the M2 Air was creating a 10,000 x 10,000-pixel document in Procreate. With 8GB of RAM, the M2 Air allowed me a maximum of just six layers at that resolution and 12 moved that up to 9 layers which isn’t a huge jump but I don’t work with many 10kx10k 300dpi images. The painting, layer blending, text, selecting and most other functions were the same as every other iPad I’ve tried. It just worked.

I tested clip studio paint, Ibis paint, Procreate and some of the Adobe offerings and all worked perfectly as expected. 2D doesn’t push these machines now so my adive would be go into an Apple shop and test what you want the iPad for and you might be surprised at how good it is. Save the hard earned cash!

3D and digital sculpting

This is where I tend to separate iPads that are simply good tablets from machines I would actually consider using professionally. When I tested the M2 Air, its 8GB of RAM was sufficient to work comfortably with models running into millions of polygons. The limitations became more apparent once I started adding GPU-heavy features such as ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing and depth of field.

With 12GB available on the M4 Air, In Nomad Sculpt I was able to push some of my test models to 16 million polygons and still be able to fully sculpt and paint and some models were in the 20 Mill range. Getting anything to subdivide above that caused a few crashes but with careful poly count management it was never an issue. I didn’t find a layer limited in Nomad and although the machine ran hot with Post Processing turned on full it was never unmanageable. I would easily use this device for my professional sculpting work and apart from the occasional model that would be above that threshold it would work well for me.

VIDEO AND PHOTO EDITING

I edited a few 2k videos using Lumafusion with great results throughout. I tried a few different transitions, adding more audio, some colour grading and everything worked as expected with no issues or crashes. I’ve never found editing on mobile devices to be the best experience, but the iPad Air experience was no different than the iPad pro experience for me.

Playback was all smooth and import and expert functions despite its Air branding, this is a genuinely capable video-editing machine. It can import, play back and edit ProRes footage, making it perfectly viable for camera-based workflows in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve which are both available on the iPad. I didn’t have much time to review the editing capabilities but the content I created was enough to give me confidence with how it imported, handled and exported my media. Certainly more than capable for online social media content and much more. The previous M2 Air was already perfectly capable of editing video, but import and export were two areas where I could feel the difference compared with the higher-end iPad Pro. That’s fixed.

Geekbench scores

The Geekbench results show just how far the Air has moved since the M2 model I previously reviewed. I always test using Geekbench for comparisons.

The M4 Air returned a Geekbench6 single-core score of 3,712 and a multi-core score of 13,168. That's roughly a 42% increase in single-core performance and 44% increase in multi-core performance compared with the M2 Air figures from my previous review. Interestingly, the single-core result even edges ahead of the M4 iPad Pro I previously tested, although the Pro maintains an advantage in multi-core performance.

The missing part of this picture is GPU (Graphics) performance which is very important to most digital creatives. Metal is Apple's built-in software that helps apps talk directly to the graphics chip. The 'Metal score' simply tells you how fast that graphics chip can process visual data. The M4 Air returned a Metal score of 53,071, compared with 30,563 from the M2 Air and 53,252 from the M4 iPad Pro. Enough said!

For raw graphical performance, so anything game or rendering related this machine is capable. More than capable. Benchmarks never tell the whole story, particularly with creative applications, but these numbers demonstrate that the Air is no longer sitting several performance tiers below Apple's professional tablets. All machines are limited by their slowest component and that can lead to bottle necks. This doesn’t have a bottleneck that I have found for more use cases.

Should you buy it?

This is becoming an increasingly difficult question because the iPad Air keeps getting better. When I reviewed the M2 version, I described it as something of a sweet spot between cost and functionality. It was the first Air that made me seriously question whether many creative users actually needed an iPad Pro.

The M4 and 12GB of unified memory push that argument considerably further. If you're coming from an iPad before the M series you are going to be blown away. If you are coming from an older M1 or M2 Ipad Pro this is going to feel like your next Pro machine. If you know you need the full 16GB on the Pro range or the OLED glass is crucial to you then you know where to put your money. If you already own the M2 Air, however, the decision is more complicated. The M2 remains an extremely capable tablet and I personally don’t think there’s enough new tech to warrant that upgrade. They look identical!

For artists and illustrators and the wider creatives this is a very capable machine. Same for the newer crop of mobile 3D artists wanting to use ZBrush and Nomad Sculpt on the go and make it seamless with their desktop work. For photographers and video editors I’d say the same but power users may find it lacking with visually or for the longer larger edits. You may want that high refresh rate.

The other consideration is price. My review model is the Space grey, Wi-Fi + Cellular version with 1TB of storage space with an apple pencil. That’s on Apple Website today for £1699 inc VAT. Once you start increasing storage and adding accessories, it's important to compare the final price with an equivalent iPad Pro rather than simply looking at Apple's headline starting price. Considerably less than the Pro but let’s be honest, think of what you could get in the Windows PC world for that. It still isn’t an entry level price point and never will be.

The question I'd ask before spending the extra money on the Pro is simple. What does the Pro actually give you, that you're going to use? If you can’t answer it and you have checked what software you want to use then this is a very good offering. For some professional users, the answer will still justify the additional expense. For a growing number of creatives, however, the Air is becoming difficult to dismiss.