Does the new iPad Air 2020 have a headphone jack or wireless charging?

iPad users have many questions on new iPad Air. Like, Does the new iPad Air 2020 have a headphone jack, wireless charging or comes with Apple Pencil or keyboard? Does it have Face ID or 120 Hz or Touch ID? iPad Air comes with Pro-style design, latest A14 Bionic processor, plus Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil 2nd generation support. Sure, you don’t get LiDAR scanners and Face ID, but it does all the important things that a Pro offers, and you get some rather attractive colours into the bargain.  Apple iPad is good for watching Netflix, playing games, surfing the web, converting into a makeshift laptop or using as a notepad and sketchbook, then the 10.2in iPad (2020) is a great option. The new processor can handle plenty of work, and the price makes it affordable even when you consider that you really do need to go for the £429/$429 128GB model. Find helpful tips on Does the new iPad Air 2020 have a headphone jack or wireless charging?

Pros & Cons – new iPad Air 2020

Pros

• Sleek design with thin bezels
• A14 Bionic chip delivers excellent performance
• Good battery life
• Loud, clear speakers
• Support for Apple Pencil 2 and Magic Keyboard but…

Cons

• Accessories are expensive add-ons
• No Face ID or headphone jack
• 64GB base storage
• Display could be brighter, more vivid

Specs

Price: $749 (starting at $599)
Display: 10.9-inch, 2360 x 1640-pixels
Storage: 64GB, 256GB
CPU: A14 Bionic
Cameras: 12MP f/1.8 (rear); 7MP f/2.2 (front)
Video: 4K at 60 fps (1080p at 240 fps Slo-mo)
Battery life: 10:29
Size: 9.7 x 7 x 0.24 inches
Weight: 1 pound

New iPad Air 2020 price and storage options

Slotting between the iPad ($329) and iPad Pro ($799), the iPad Air starts at $599 with 64GB of storage. Upgrading to 256GB of storage raises the price to $749. An extra $130 on top of the Wi-Fi-only price gets you LTE support for mobile connectivity. 

Apple doesn’t sell a 128GB model so you’re stuck with limited storage (64GB) or forced to spend $749 on the 256GB model, which is only $50 less than the 128GB iPad Pro (11-inch).

• iPad Air (2020) 64GB Wi-Fi: £579/$579
• iPad Air (2020) 256GB Wi-Fi: £729/$729
• iPad Air (2020) 64GB Wi-Fi + Cellular: £709/$709
• iPad Air (2020) 256GB Wi-Fi + Cellular: £859/$859

What is the upgrade in new iPad Air 2020?

There are two things which will be of interest for musicians and producers. First off, Apple is switching the iPad Air to USB-C with support for 20W charging and 5Gbps data transfer speeds. That’s a sound decision, but any of your Lighting-connected peripherals are immediately rendered obsolete. One of the most significant changes this generation is the migration from Lightning to USB-C. With USB-C, there is an unending list of new functionality afforded by various peripherals. You can now connect to plenty of devices, such as external USB-C 4K displays, printers, USB-C hubs with multiple SSDs, SD cards, and wired Ethernet. It will let you directly connect your camera that uses USB Type-C, such as the latest mirrorless cameras or the new GoPro Hero9 Black.

Second, the new A14 Bionic chipset is not only about a 40% performance increase over the old iPad Air. A new 16-core Neural Engine is in place to boost machine learning, enabling new possibilities for machine learning music apps like DJ Pro AI. With up to 11 trillion operations per second, it’s safe to say apps like this one will work a lot more smoothly. Meanwhile, developers have a whole new engine to rely on in exploring machine learning opportunities. Lots of great stuff could be thrown at music producers – think automated mastering, song construction, generative synths and so on.

New iPad Air 2020 comparison

Does a new iPad Air 2020 have a headphone jack?

The iPad Air 4, unlike its predecessor, does not have a headphone jack. If you’re hoping to listen to audio with headphones or earbuds, you’re going to have to either use Bluetooth or a USB-C cable or adapter. This is not at all an issue for me, since I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones for many years now. I do realize, however, that some people just prefer wired headphones and this may be a disappointment to you.

New iPad Air 2020 review

Avialble color

Apple’s iPad Air is the first iPad to offer unique color options similar to iPhone colors. The iPad Air is available in silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue.

Design

The Air’s redesigned chassis has slimmer display bezels, allowing for a smaller footprint and more immersive viewing. Gone are the circular power button and white bezels, and in their place are slim black borders that contrast against the colorful screen. The edge-to-edge panel modernizes the iPad Air.

At 9.7 x 7 x 0.24 inches and 1 pound, the iPad Air is thinner and lighter than the Microsoft Surface Go 2 (9.7 x 6.9 x 0.3 inches, 1.2 pounds) and about the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 (10 x 6.5 x 0.25 inches and 1.1 pounds). The 11-inch iPad Pro has almost the same dimensions and weight as the iPad Air, coming in at 8.7 x 7 x 0.23 inches and 1 pound. 

iPad Air display 

The iPad Air has a 10.9-inch, 2360 x 1640-pixel Liquid Retina LED display with True Tone. It’s a nice screen, but not the most colorful and it lacks the silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate found on the iPad Pro. 

Magic Keyboard

The Magic Keyboard is a necessary accessory for the iPad Air to double as a laptop; the keys are snappy and the floating hinge lets you comfortably read the display. The 3.9 x 1.8-inch touchpad underneath the keys has a smooth glass surface and responds quickly to swipes and gestures.

Camera

The iPad Air has a 12-megapixel main camera, the same as the main camera on the iPad Pro, and a 7-megapixel front-facing camera, again the same as the front camera on the Pro. The main camera is a bit of an improvement over the base iPad’s 8-megapixel sensor—it records 4K video rather than 1080p, and has better HDR and low-light capabilities.

The low-cost iPad has a grainy 1.2-megapixel camera that’s better than a laptop webcam, but not by much. The iPad Air has a 7-megapixel front camera with much stronger low-light capabilities and makes you look infinitely better on Zoom calls.

Audio

The iPad Air 4 has two sets of stereo speakers and if it’s the only method you have for listening to music, it’ll do, but only just. The true stereo sound makes for a pleasant experience, you’re getting sound out of both sides of the iPad Air. But, it still sounds like you’re listening to music in a metal box. It’s tinny and flat. If you’re watching a movie in bed or listening to music in an office and have to keep the volume down, it’s a pretty great experience. When you keep the volume down, you get a very clear sound.

A14 Bionic Chip

Apple’s new iPad Air includes a 6-core A14 Bionic chip, which is Apple’s newest A-series chip built on a 5-nanometer process. Apple rarely introduces a new chip in an iPad before it comes to an iPhone, but the 2020 iPad Air got an A14 chip first. According to Apple, the A-series chip provides 40 percent faster CPU performance and a 30 percent improvement in GPU performance thanks to the new 4-core GPU architecture.

The A14 chip includes a new 16-core Neural Engine that’s twice as fast as the Neural Engine in the prior-generation chip, and there are second-generation machine learning accelerators for 10 times faster machine learning calculations.

Apple Pencil 2

Writing and drawing with the Apple Pencil feels great. When Apple launched iPadOS, it dropped the Apple Pencil’s latency from 20 milliseconds to 9ms so scribbling lines or handwriting notes feels almost as instantaneous as putting ink to paper. That being said, artists don’t get the benefit of the 120Hz panel on the iPad Pro. 

The Apple Pencil 2nd Gen is one of the best tools for artists drawing on a digital canvas. About the size of a standard pencil and similar in girth, the Pencil is nicely balanced and the flat side makes it easy to grip. 

Does iPad Air have 120Hz?

The Air lacks the iPad Pro’s 120Hz ProMotion display with 240Hz touch sampling, and in lab tests, that does mean a less responsive stylus. But in real life, you don’t notice. I gave both the Air and the Pro to my wife, an artist and art teacher, and she couldn’t tell the difference in terms of responsiveness. Brushes in Procreate on the two devices do act a little differently, but we can’t say that one is better than the other.

Wi-Fi 6

The Air uses the Wi-Fi and 4G chipsets from the iPad Pro line, which have significantly better performance than the one in the base iPad. The Air has Wi-Fi 6, which the base model doesn’t, but you don’t need a Wi-Fi 6 router to see the difference here.

Tested against a 500Mbps Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) connection, a weak 5GHz Wi-Fi signal gave us 136Mbps on the iPad Air (about the same as on the Pro and most flagship smartphones right now), but only 20.6Mbps on the base iPad. That’s a big difference. Note that you need to be using 5GHz Wi-Fi to see this difference, as the two tablets have about the same performance when ratcheted down to 2.4GHz-only mode.

The Air has better LTE and Bluetooth than the base iPad, as well. The Bluetooth support jumps from version 4.2 to version 5.0 for longer range. And LTE support adds bands 46 and 48, also known as LAA and CBRS. These are high-speed, in-city network bands that are used to give Wi-Fi or 5G-like speeds in inner-city areas.

Does iPad Air have Touch ID?

The only notable difference is that the Sleep/Wake button on the iPad Air 4 is shiny and black instead of the brushed aluminum of a standard button. That’s because of Touch ID. The iPad Air 4 doesn’t have a dedicated Home button and it doesn’t support Face ID. Instead, the biometric scanner comes in the form of a one-inch long, quarter-inch wide (if that) fingerprint scanner where the Sleep/Wake button is. And, yes. It also functions as a Sleep/Wake button.

iPadOS 14 

Merging the best of iOS and macOS, iPadOS 14 adds various features to improve multitasking while retaining the simplicity of a mobile OS. Redesigned widgets now come in various sizes and show more information. Advertisement

A new feature called Smart Stack uses AI to automatically surface the best widgets at the right time based on your time, location and activity. 

iPad Air battery life and charger 

The Air reached Apple’s 10 hours of battery life estimate plus another half hour on our in-house test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits), powering off after 10 hours and 29 minutes.

Anything beyond 10 hours is a great result, but other tablets endure for longer on a charge. The Surface Go 2 (11:39), Galaxy Tab S7 (13:08) and iPad (12:57) will get you a few extra hours of use while the iPad Pro 12.9-inch nearly matched the iPad Air at 10:16. The iPad Air and Pro fall just shy of the 10:56 category average.

The iPad Air got the upgrade the iPhone 12 missed out on. Replacing the Lightning port is a USB Type-C input. And unlike the new iPhone 12 variants, the iPad Air ships with a USB-C charging brick and a Type-C-to-Type-C cable for fast charging. 

In our tests, the iPad Air charged to 25% in 30 minutes, so you can expect a full charge in a few hours.

Gaming review

With a faster processor than even the iPad Pro, I immediately thought of gaming on iPad. Apple has successfully increased its revenue for services in the past year and that is due, in part, to Apple Arcade. Apple products have never been thought of as gaming devices, but an A14 processor on a mobile device with a 10.9-inch liquid retina screen is a recipe for some really fun gaming.

Pairing a controller with the iPad Air 4, like the Playstation DualShock controller or Xbox Wireless controller, and you’re taking gaming to the next level. No, we’re not talking about PS5 or Xbox Series X level gaming, but it’s absolutely on par with Nintendo Switch.

Drop another two GB of RAM into the iPad Air 4 and I could absolutely see it as thee mobile device to play Xbox Game Pass games on if it actually ever happens.

Performance

The measurements we clocked with our colorimeter were as I expected: good, not great. The iPad Air’s display covers 102% of the sRGB color gamut, making it slightly more colorful than the display on the iPad (97%) but not as vibrant as those on the iPad Pro (123%), Surface Go 2 (107%) and Galaxy Tab S7 (152%). 

With 440 nits of average brightness, the iPad Air’s screen is visible outside on bright days. It practically matches the category average (442 nits) but is dimmer than the iPad Pro (559 nits), iPad (484 nits) and Galaxy Tab S7 (499 nits). The Air gets brighter than the Surface Go 2 (408 nits).

The Air scored a 4,262 on the Geekbench 5 overall performance test, crushing the Galaxy Tab S7 (3,074, Snapdragon 865+), the Surface Go 2 (1,563, Core m3-8100Y), and the iPad 8 (2,685, A12 Bionic). Only the iPad Pro (4,720), armed with an 8-core A12Z Bionic chip, notched a higher score than the Air. It’s worth pointing out that the Surface Pro 7, using a laptop-grade Core i7 U-series chip, narrowly beat the iPad Air with a score of 4,443.  

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