Half a kilogram does not sound like much, until you are sprinting through an airport or your shoulder gives out after a full day of back-to-back presentations. That is roughly what the 13-inch iPad Air M4 saves you over most laptops, and at 616g, it is a trade worth interrogating.
For four days, I used it for note-taking, photo management, editing, and writing at Watches & Wonders in Geneva, one of the most logistically demanding events in the luxury calendar. If it holds up there, it holds up anywhere. Here is what I discovered.
The Apple Pencil Pro and the M4’s Neural Engine make note-taking highly effective. Using the same document, I could jot down observations by hand, switch to typing paragraphs between sessions, record the audio of key moments, and drop photos from presentations straight into my notes.
The M4 chip earns its keep here; its 16-core Neural Engine handles on-device AI tasks, including GoodNotes’ AI features like searching handwritten text, without lag. Additionally, the 12MP rear camera held up well in poorly lit press conference rooms, with images appearing in my notes almost instantly.
Anyone who has covered a major trade fair knows the Wi-Fi situation is invariably grim, so it helped that the N1 chip has Wi-Fi 7 support (lower latency in congested environments is the real gain, not speed), but when that wasn’t enough, I tethered to my iPhone.
Personal Hotspot reliability is one of the N1’s specific improvements, and it showed. Meanwhile, iPadOS 26’s Files app makes it easy to toggle between downloads, documents, shared folders, and OneDrive. Rather than fractured WhatsApp threads and misfired email attachments, my colleague and I could conveniently share a single organised folder that updated in real time.
The real game-changer, however, is the Magic Keyboard. It feels like a proper work set-up. The trackpad, combined with the touchscreen, makes seamless app switching—whether editing a reel in CapCut Pro, organising images, downloading high-res files, or speed-reading a PDF in Preview (iPadOS 26’s dedicated editor)—so fluid and intuitive.
In addition, the 12GB unified memory (up from 8GB on the M3) has everything running smoothly and fast, keeping apps open and ready without reloading every time. According to Apple, the M4’s 8-core CPU and 9-core GPU are 30 percent faster than the M3 and 2.3 times faster than the M1. In my hands, it handled tasks efficiently, did not feel warm to the touch, and showed no signs of stalling during extended use.
However, there are limitations. iPadOS is not a full desktop operating system. It cannot fully replace a computer for tasks requiring desktop programs like InDesign, which I use. In that regard, I marked up edits on the go and made corrections at the end of the day. This division of work is effective but demands adaptability.
That said, I have long suspected that carrying my laptop is more of a habit than a necessity, and those four days in Geneva with the iPad Air M4 confirmed that.
